Hard Deck

You can't fly a glider the way airlines fly. Airline pilots flying general aviation aircraft on their days off have the same accident rate as nonairline pilots. I'm not defending ****ty flying, just pointing out that the airline model is not applicable outside of the airlines. From being around the reckless fringes of aviation I think the only method that improves safety is mockery and social shame. Don't help pilots hide their stupid, instead openly mock poor piloting decisions. Safety through bullying. Yes it is unpleasant, that is why it works.
On Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 10:49:36 AM UTC-5, John Cochrane wrote:
Nice story T8

It is interesting that over the last few decades, airlines have reduced crashes essentially to zero. Ok, not quite still, but orders of magnitude safer than any other means of transportation (trains, cars, busses) and probably walking too.

Meanwhile, gliders continue on our merry way, with something like 3 fatalities per year out of well less than 10,000 active pilots in the US. Far more than driving, with far fewer hours per year.

By all rights, this should be safer than power flying. The planes are simple and true mechanical failure extremely rare. No engine? No engine failure, no engine fire, no gas to run out of. We just eliminated a lot of GA power's main problems. It is never an emergency that the engine quit. You know the engine quit from the moment you got out of bed in the morning! It is perfectly predictable that you will need to find a place to land. We don't fly at night. We don't fly in fog, marginal IFR, low cloudbases, all the get-home-itis situations that tempt power pilots to trouble. We're not trying to get somewhere. There are no passengers to disappoint.

So just why is our accident rate so awful. Well, yes, you say, training and so forth. Except the accident rate among well trained pilots is pretty awful too. Think of all the famous pilots, or your many thousand hours friends who crashed on ridges, crashed in off field landings, ran in to mountains, broke up in lennies, and so forth.

One contrast. The airlines look hard at each crash, and take positive steps to do something about it. We sit in the back and mutter "what a bozo, I wouldn't do that." Another: flying an airliner looks like a lot less fun.

John Cochrane

Good points. I've noticed a few airline pilots among the particularly, er, bold contest pilots; one or two in the crash statistics including (sadly) an airline safety check pilot glider fatality, involving very low and late decisionmaking about a landout; and I have seen airline pilots particularly vocal (to the point of yelling at me using profanity) about ideas like high finish gates and hard decks, ideas they fly by every day of their working lives. Of course, I know some other airline pilots in the glider community who are absolute models of how to fly fast, efficiently, proficiently, and safely. So bottom line, there is no obvious correlation. An interesting perspective for the proposition that more education will help.

Another aspect is planning. As someone said earlier in the thread, we head off cross country with very little planning. I am particularly guilty of this, often showing up at a race with very little time spent even considering the area to be flown.

Imagine if airlines had to thermal to get from place to place. Surely every single landable field along the way would be marked, studied, in a little booklet (now computer), and you would fly "airport to airport" with conservative numerical minimums. The idea that the pilot would just look out the window, commit to his course while still far away, then find and evaluate fields from the air would be laughed at. (A paradox of our immense high performance gliders is that you really cannot evaluate your landing options from the air. At 10k AGL out west especially, your landing option can be 50 miles away, over a hill and up a valley!)

If only there were 100,000 of us, this kind of investment would be worth it..

John Cochrane

On 2/4/2018 5:16 PM, John Cochrane wrote:
snip

Imagine if airlines had to thermal to get from place to place.
snip
John Cochrane
Imagine the cleanup crews required to remove the vomit from the
cabins... :-D
--
Dan, 5J

On Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 12:54:03 PM UTC-5, wrote:
You can't fly a glider the way airlines fly. Airline pilots flying general aviation aircraft on their days off have the same accident rate as nonairline pilots. I'm not defending ****ty flying, just pointing out that the airline model is not applicable outside of the airlines. From being around the reckless fringes of aviation I think the only method that improves safety is mockery and social shame. Don't help pilots hide their stupid, instead openly mock poor piloting decisions. Safety through bullying. Yes it is unpleasant, that is why it works.

Maybe a feature of each pilots meeting could be an evaluation of the previous day's landouts (ideally with a projector). I gotta think some of my patterns would've been better if I knew everyone would be analyzing it the next day. We could even hand out gold stars.

You can't fly a glider the way airlines fly. Airline pilots flying
general aviation aircraft on their days off have the same accident rate
as nonairline pilots. I'm not defending ****ty flying, just pointing out
that the airline model is not applicable outside of the airlines. From
being around the reckless fringes of aviation I think the only method
that improves safety is mockery and social shame. Don't help pilots hide
their stupid, instead openly mock poor piloting decisions. Safety
through bullying. Yes it is unpleasant, that is why it works.

Maybe a feature of each pilots meeting could be an evaluation of the
previous day's landouts (ideally with a projector). I gotta think some of
my patterns would've been better if I knew everyone would be analyzing it
the next day. We could even hand out gold stars.

"Safety through bullying"...haw! (IMO, on-target peer pressure ain't bullying.)

Semantics aside, peer pressure and Darwinism - damn powerful forces!
Resistance is futile!!!

Bob W.

---
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
http://www.avg.com