Safety Corner-Nov/issue

While Thelen's column suffer occasionly from lack of facts and too much
speculations, especially when he doesn't get around to interview the
pilots involved or eye witnesses, let's not forget that it is all
voluntarily. The NTSB, on the other end, is getting paid to produce
completely useless and inaccurate accident reports. Unless the accident
involved a celebrity or a famous pilot, the investigation is
wortheless. For example compare the NTSB report about the Owl accicdent
at http://www.ntsb.gov/NTSB/brief.asp?e...30X01573&key=1 to
Eric's report from the manufacture.
Thelen's safety corner at least attemtps to investigate the accidents
and provide us with food for thoughts. It is usually the first column I
read, accurate or not.

Ramy

Gary Evans wrote:
At 00:42 07 November 2006, Km wrote:

Eric Greenwell wrote:
KM wrote:
Brian wrote:

You are misreading my statements - I did not admit
nor imply anything
like that.

Yes I did, sorry about that.

You mean the domes and stuff? I think some of those
things could improve
the visual discovery by an aircrew, but think getting
any of it into
these planes is most unlikely. That doesn't make it
BS - he states it's
his opinion. He clearly thinks pilots going so fast
they can't clear
their path should do more to avoid problems. You might
not agree, but
that still doesn't make it BS. Naive, maybe; BS, no.

Not just the domes Eric.It was pretty much the whole
thing.The fact
that he started analizing an airline crash was very
irritating and he
didnt need to place blame either.This stuff is clearly
outside the
scope of Soaring magazine.I think that readers should
understand that a
small plane is VERY hard to see soon enough to do anything
about at 300
KTS. Another thing is turn that transponder ON and
the jet WILL pick
you up at least 20 miles away.

George's column is there every month, but it is not
the only
'opportunity' for safety content in the magazine:
currently, the Soaring
Safety Foundation is running a series on safety, and
there are other
articles on safety during the year. The November issue
had an article by
Knauff, for example.

So true, but from what I have seen in the few years
I have been reading
Soaring, his is the only one that deals with accident
investigations.This is where I think his conclusions
need to be more
consistent with the facts so that the average reader
can learn
something and prevent a future problem.

Still, there are other ways to do a safety column.
One that might
satisfy your complaints and still yield an interesting
column and not a
clone of a (yawn) NTSB report would be a team of 2
or 3 pilots writing
the column. Ideally, they'd have quite different backgrounds
and soaring
experiences, so more factors would be examined and
more knowledge put
into it than any one writer could manage.

Having a team would reduce the work each had to do.
The actual writing
could be by all three, or individually, or a mix of
group and
individually written columns. By operating it as a
team and not just 2
or 3 pilots writing a column alternately, the column
could be consistent
in approach, avoiding conflicting recommendations.

What does KM think about this idea? What does RAS
think about this
approach? How is it handled by other countries?

I think it is a great idea.Depending on lead times
and such I might not
be able to help out on a consistant basis but I am
all for it.



The benefit in the Safety Column to me is the communications
of what occurred and not necessarily any resultant
recommendations. As in everything I hear or read I
try to separate the facts from opinions or conjecture
and I'll make my own judgments on that basis. With
a column subject like this it would be difficult to
find a author that would not put in some degree of
personal opinion and I doubt that (at least from RAS
perspective) it would ever satisfy everyone. IMO this
particular article did a pretty good job of keeping
the two separate.