Hard Deck

as one of the guys in the report #7 - I believe I had given up on the task completely - way before the crash. I know for sure, points were not in my mind at all, promise.

I am not opposed the the Hard Deck - it will have no affect on my flying (my own is higher than 500 ft). I am just not so sure that most low thermaling happens because a person feels like they can continue lower and still be in the race.

We get together once a week here in NYC for Beer Night - "Hard Deck" was the topic of last evening - there wasn't much consensus but there was allot of conversation.

It seems to fall into 2 camps ... "Big Brother" vs "I am just keeping you safe from your own temptations" - both seem pretty reasonable.

An interesting point was "the hard deck would make me make decisions higher then I normally do" - at least for him, he thought it would help - even make him faster.

Feeling the obligation to explain yourself to your peers/mentor/family....... that's motivation enough for me - been there done that - goig to try not to do that nay more.

WH

This has been an interesting and pretty civil discussion involving primarily two polar opposites, personal freedoms and restrictive structures. Thanks to everyone who has posted here without flares that normally result when dealing with such a flammable topic lol.

One aspect I would like to introduce to the discussion is one of the elemental nature of racing or record setting. Racing/record setting are by nature games of managing risk for maximum achievement. The very fact that there are those who want to attempt to "manage" the risk of others flies in the face of the very nature of the sport. Are some "guidlines/disincentives" needed? Yes, but I feel we are trending into the realm of trying to micromanage the sport.

Second, historically, races are not only won by those flying the perfect flight, with decisions made that minimized risk and maximized speed, but ALSO days are won by those same pilots who chose or had to take a major calculated risk to win the day. Those who are trying to eliminate that side of the contest also eliminate a whole grouping of pilots who have developed the skill set for that method of fast flying. This new rule schema/trend that is developing, in essence, penalizes guys like moffat, reichman scott and streideck who knew how to fly very aggressively. Karl has commented on this thread saying basically the same thing. Do all of you "new generation" fliers who want a more regulated form of racing think his opinion is unqualified or out of touch with what sailplane racing is all about? I think many of you actually do and think that form of flying has no place in todays game.

I think much of this argument has been caused by the charactoristics of modern sailplanes themselves. Low saves, landing out, higher risk decisions were normative for racing in the older generation of competition. If you couldn't fly that way, at times, then you could not be competative. Today, performance is such that the game is more a game of micro decisions, not macro ones. When guys today are forced into macro decisions like a low save or even a land out for that matter, they are ill equiped to handle them. That's the true problem underlying a majority of the racing accidents today. Expanded rules implimentation does'nt really address the that fundamental problem but it definitely does redefine the nature of the race.

If we can control the usable airspace, let's make racing extremely fair so everyone uses the same air. We can have the CD create airspace "hallways" a few miles wide which connect each TP. Since we can detect where everyone is we can legislate the direction of travel within each hallway to avoid the mayhem of two way traffic.

Just because we have the ability to do something doesn't mean we have to do it. Safety rules should not be put into place to keep someone from killing themselves. Safety rules should prevent someone from taking others with them.

Someone augurs in because of "x" it really sucks. If the same "x" takes an innocent pilot or someone on the ground with them it is tragic.

On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 7:12:53 AM UTC-5, wrote:
If we can control the usable airspace, let's make racing extremely fair so everyone uses the same air. We can have the CD create airspace "hallways" a few miles wide which connect each TP. Since we can detect where everyone is we can legislate the direction of travel within each hallway to avoid the mayhem of two way traffic.

Just because we have the ability to do something doesn't mean we have to do it. Safety rules should not be put into place to keep someone from killing themselves. Safety rules should prevent someone from taking others with them.

Someone augurs in because of "x" it really sucks. If the same "x" takes an innocent pilot or someone on the ground with them it is tragic.

Absolutely right!

I didn't get the whole part of this thread on winners. We pretty much know who the top 5 of any contest are going in to it. And accidents seem spread pretty evenly across the scoresheet.

The amazing thing to me as a constant safety guy is just how many risks I see guys in 26th place taking for a few more points. Ballistic trajectory over the last trees to make the airport and get a rolling finish. Flying through thunderstorms. Flying low over totally unlandable terrain. Last minute landouts often coming to grief. Flying 200 feet in to the clouds in start gaggles. Past VNE starts, back in those good old days. Aggressive gaggling. The land-out "patterns" described in the safety reports. Endless very low energy scary finishes back when we had the line (50 feet, 50 knots, middle of the airport is not a great place to be). Flying after all night retrieves and 2 hours sleep. Flying gliders with home-brew repairs after contest damage. None of these pilots does anything nearly so nuts in weekend xc flying..

Yes you say, give them a lecture to stop it, it's not worth it, you're not going to climb out of 26th place this way. And we have been giving that lecture for 50 years, with no discernible result. What do they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?

Meanwhile, when we put in a low speed start system and higher finishes, those crashes ended.

John Cochrane

On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 6:11:23 PM UTC-5, John Cochrane wrote:
Meanwhile, when we put in a low speed start system and higher finishes, those crashes ended.

We can debate the finish gate (actually, let's not!). But I've gotta question what data you have on high-speed start crashes. I didn't see any in your PPT (I'm not sure when we ditched the start gate but it was still around for at least part of your study period).

I only recall two. One in Minden in the 1970s caused (IIRC) by not locking the main pins so they ratcheted out and departed the fuselage (pilot bailed out successfully). The other was a PIO at Fairfield in the late 90s (?) when a handheld radio got loose in the cockpit and the pilot reached for it, losing control of the glider and departing the cockpit through the hole in the canopy created by the errant radio (also a successful bailout).

Oh, and I'm told there was a pilot who fluttered an early ASW 20 elevator in the 1980s and landed uneventfully to discover some internal damage in the control system.

High-speed starts always sounded lethal whenever CAI and the then Rules Committee were trying to justify mandating GPS flight recorders. Everyone just KNEW high-speed starts were dangerous! To me that's analogous to your average bystander thinking it simply must be dangerous to fly an aircraft without an engine.

I've actually been a lot more uncomfortable on the edge of start cylinders winding around in a gaggle faster and faster with half a dozen gliders all trying to stay a few feet below the top, watching the clock, looking out for at least half a dozen more orbiting in a different part of thermal plus another half dozen bumping the thermal on their way out of the cylinder. A few feet too high? No problem with the gate: just push over on your start run a little sooner. With the cylinder, get the brakes out and ease back down through the gaggle, but not too low, while watching the clock again. I'm not sure that's progress in terms of safety. Nothing comes for free. At least with the start gate, we knew precisely where the start traffic would be.

It's those unintended consequences again.

Chip Bearden

At 00:52 03 February 2018, wrote:


I only recall two. One in Minden in the 1970s caused (IIRC) by not
locking the main pins so they ratcheted out and departed the fuselage
(pilot bailed out successfully). The other was a PIO at Fairfield in the
late 90s (?)

Chip, there was at least one more, and it was fatal. It was an
ASW-19 which was owned by Einar Enevoldson and a USAF test
pilot partner. Einar's partner was practicing high speed starts (so it
may not actually have been during a contest) when he got the
elevator into a flutter mode. IIRC, the stabilizer came off, and he
was killed. I think it happened in CA, and there were law suit issues
so that the USA Schleicher dealer would have had legal issues had he
set foot in CA afterwards. The time frame was early 1980's. After
that, an AD came out to cut two triangular slivers (max 1" wide) off
the elevator trailing edges.

RO

"Today, performance"

It would be interesting to know if the fatality rate was the same when 1-26 were to only racing machines.

Our gliders have evolved allot in the past 5 decades - I know as technology advanced in a bunch of high speed sports ( cars, bobsleds, skiing....) the playing field and/or the rules had to adapt.

I am a libertarian at heart, except when my kids play a sport - then I hope the adults made the rules so the kids can play safe

I do not know the answer.

WH

On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 7:32:47 AM UTC-5, wrote:
Our gliders have evolved allot in the past 5 decades - I know as technology advanced in a bunch of high speed sports ( cars, bobsleds, skiing....) the playing field and/or the rules had to adapt.


Today's gliders are safer. They handle better with more benign stall/spin characteristics (though most will still spin if provoked). Gliders in general and Schleicher gliders specifically are safer in crashes due to stronger materials and newer impact-absorbing cockpits and landing gears (they won't save you if you go straight in, of course). DG has done some good work on safety and I think all the glider manufacturers are paying much more attention to it.

We're carrying more safety equipment: e.g., ELTs, FLARMs. We're more aware of the hazards of dehydration, medications, etc. We're flying fewer hours (shorter tasks) and with more sleep (fewer, often no long retrieves).

I'd say that audio variometers have contributed to safety because they help keep our heads out of the cockpits but the proliferation of electronics in our panels has pushed us in the wrong direction, even allowing for the benefit of not having to study a Sectional chart closely.

I don't have data on earlier accident and fatality rates but it would be great if someone smart who's inclined that way could analyze it (9B???).

It's a tiny sample but here are the stats for pilots I have been able to recall I knew who were killed in glider crashes, by year:

1979
1980 (2)
1981
1984
1986
1992 (2)
1994
1999 (3 pilots, in two incidents)
2004
2010
2012

I wouldn't want to draw any real conclusions, not least because these are just pilots I knew/met. And in my early years, I simply hadn't met as many. Plus I don't know how many total pilots and contest days are involved, and not all of these deaths occurred during contest flights. But my sense is that it's not getting worse, and perhaps a bit better.

Chip Bearden

Chip's great stories reminded me of one of my most magnificent experiences in a glider. This was coming back to Crystaire after a long flight decades ago. The sun had set and the gliderport was closed and completely vacated.. I did a long low pass westbound down the length of the runway then pulled up for a right downwind. As I pulled up, right there, were two eagles circling together to the right in a 1 knot end-of-day thermal. I joined the two eagles across that thermal for a few hundred feet of climb before continuing my landing.

Obviously I was quite low when I made those thermalling turns yet I am as sure now as I was then that making those turns was perfectly safe for me and for all other human beings. The air was still -- there was essentially no chance of encountering any degree of sink or turbulence at that particular occasion.

Exactly that will never happen again. But something similar might. I choose liberty please. Pretty please.

I retract all of my previous suggestion about how to do an equivalent of hard deck more simply. I want none of it now after thinking more on the subject. At the same time, I commend BB for bringing forward this thoughtful ideas to keep us safer while I remain skeptical that a hard deck could have more than a miniscule impact on our dismal accident statistics. It's been an interesting discussion.

BB has said: What's the big deal? A hard deck is no different than the 17,500 ceiling that we all have agreed to live with. Well; I, for one, never would have chosen to agree to that. I'm sure I'm not the only racing pilot that routinely gets ****ed off every time I get to 17,400 in a strong thermal and have to break off 500 feet early to accommodate the rules. I don't want another airspace constraint to be ****ed off about. I especially don't want to have to deal with contest airspace issues when I'm at pattern altitude.

There are people here in Arizona that will advocate for red light cameras, for banning cell phone use in cars and for banning citizens from carrying guns. All those safety things get routinely voted down around here. It seems a lot of us humans value liberty over personal safety. It's a DNA thing.