Hard Deck

On Saturday, February 3, 2018 at 8:24:32 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Saturday, February 3, 2018 at 6:15:06 PM UTC-8, 3j wrote:
At 00:13 04 February 2018, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Friday, February 2, 2018 at 9:52:17 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn
wrote:

Here's a link to some files summarizing Glider Fatal and Non-Fatal
Accidents over a 20 year period between 1994 and 2013.

https://drive.google.com/open?
id=1sbx5LHrvryYyYRU0UnapIOscTfzuk5aY



I've received reports of an inoperative link:

Try this one if you have an interest:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...yYyYRU0UnapIOs
cTfzuk5aY?usp=sharing

Andy Blackburn
9B

Andy, The 4/1/2004 midair at Oso, WA. The Libelle pilot was not
killed. He walked out after a parachute deployment.

Thanks - I'm sure he'll be glad to hear that.

I'll go back and check why that came out that way.

Andy

Apologies, I should have checked first before making a joke. I see now this was the Libelle/DG-400 midair.

The database correctly shows the fatality in the DG, not the Libelle. The way the NTSB tracks these accidents there were two gliders involved in a fatal accident with a single fatality. There are some others, such as the towplane that collided with a Cirrus in Colorado. That one show three aircraft and four fatalities with a glider involved.

9B

Same thing happened to me when I was independently querying the NTSB database a few nights ago. Twice I read fatality reports involving pilots I knew were still around (e.g., KS)! Turns out there were two reports for the midairs, one for each aircraft. The reports, often written by investigators who know little about soaring, are imperfect albeit sobering. And they're searchable by various criteria. And downloadable.

Without mentioning types, I was struck by how often certain gliders seemed to show up. Maybe 9B could do some analysis leading to a "safest gliders to fly" or "safest gliders for lower-time pilots" or "safest gliders to crash" report. Seriously. Many of the data needed are available, not all from the same source, of course: accidents, registrations, hours and ratings of the affected pilots (usually), hours in type, context (contest participation is often mentioned when applicable), contest experience by pilot and by type, pilot ranking at the time, age, etc. I wish the digitized versions went back further (1982 IIRC) but there is still a lot of valuable information.

Chip Bearden