2nd-Guessing Accidents (aka Seeking Personal Insight)

So far, the USA's 2012 northern spring appears to be shaping up to be a
"typical soaring season" in accident terms. In my view, that's not a good
thing. Why? Summary-to-date follows...

- - - - - -
1/28/12 - 2-33 seriously damaged in a non-rope-break approach accident; at
least one occupant precautionarily taken to hospital for back pain.

2/5/12 - Duo-Discus (NOT an accident - but easily *might* have been) landed at
Heavenly Valley Ski Resort on a Sunday during a BFR.

2/22/12 - Twin Grob seriously damaged in some TBD situation/manner in HI; no
known injuries.

4/5/12 - HP-14 "substantially damaged" with no known injury to pilot in an
attempted on-airport landing.

4/11/12 - SZD-48 "substantially damaged" and pilot suffered "minor injuries"
in some sort of TBD landing accident.

4/29/12 - JS-1 bailed out of after some sort of TBD rudder control system
failure; pilot apparently not seriously injured.

5/5 (or 5/6)/12 - PIK-20D seriously broken in a landing accident; pilot
apparently not seriously injured.
- - - - - -

So far:
- 0 fatalities; multiple precautionary hospitalizations
- 1 glider almost certainly destroyed
- 5 gliders substantially damaged
- unknown amount of anguish & after-the-fact soul-searching by numerous
people/pilots
- - - - - -

5 out of 6 accidents (almost certainly) easily avoidable.
- - - - - -

JUSTIFICATION/THINKING
Reason for this post is simply to openly discuss a topic that inevitably
induces heartburn in some of our U.S. soaring community's too small
population: individually-based accident assessments...often called
"2nd-guessing" or "speculation." Not infrequently, doing it generates real ire
in some, especially in an interactive forum as RAS.

FWIW/IMHO, trying to learn from others' misfortunes ASAP (always a personal
goal), better the serves the active pilot community as a whole than "waiting
until the NTSB/official report" to begin "officially-supported speculation."

Learning is a lifelong process, and those *always* actively seeking to learn
from others' situations/events/misfortunes are more likely to do so in
considerably more timely fashion than those "of inquiring mind who prefer to
wait (for NTSB reports,)" or (worse), those of closed/uninquiring minds. To my
mind, an active desire to learn is simple prudence, given routine engagement
in activities containing sufficient kinetic energy to easily kill participants
(e.g. driving, flying).

I've acted on this thought ever since obtaining my auto license. Prior, the
first person I applied my critical judgement to was an older sister whose
general lack of behind-the-wheel "situational awareness" made a doofus
16-year-old (me) nervous to the point my mother and I agreed it was preferable
for me to hitch-hike home from high school than wait to be chauffeured by my
older sister. (Yeah, that was a different time in the U.S. back in the late
'60's!)

I expanded my critical assessment arena to include power flying during
college, from beginning to read "Flying" magazines left around the
undergraduate engineering lounge.

By graduation time I'd a working hypothesis that most car/power-plane
accidents were driver-/pilot-influenced, if not outright induced.

I began taking soaring lessons in late '72, and sometime approaching initial
solo was given a handout of "Soaring" magazine "Safety Corner" articles from
the mid-1960s by my Club's chief instructor. Prior to then, we'd exchanged
perhaps 2 or 3 sentences, and the older gent intimidated wet-eared me due to
age, position and relative experience. He may not have walked on water as I
suspected he did, but I knew darned well that *I* did not! So it was with
genuine concern that the exchange of reading material from him to me included
also the assignment: "Read these, and tell me the most important lesson in
them." Talk about pressure!

Absorbing the articles took a month or so...and about the ONLY lesson I could
see in them was the bulk of the incidents and accidents were "stupid pilot
tricks." Uncertain this was the insight the Chief Instructor was looking for
from me, I read the articles a second time, more slowly. I then procrastinated
returning the collection for fear of failing his test.

Major Relief: I passed this particular test. Forty subsequent years of
continuing to try and learn from others' misfortunes haven't substantively
changed the assessments made in the 1960's (about drivers) and the early 1970s
(about pilots). IMHO, only a single-digit-small percentage of accidents are
NOT operator influenced (if not outright induced).

Unsurprisingly, my own flying (and driving) careers reflect that assessment.
Happily both have fairly rare and essentially exclusively minor personal
contributions to the incident/accident records, though there was one soaring
accident in 1975 that was major (in glider damage terms), dramatic (in pilot
terms) and was arguably in the pilot-influenced category despite never being
outside demonstrated/POH V-n limits. Had the same set of circumstances been
encountered subsequent to gaining the 1st-hand experience of the '75 event
subsequent to then, no one would've known of the subsequent incident unless I
chose to share it with them. Sort of a QED event, one could say, in the
"learning from others' misfortunes" sense of things!
- - - - - -

MINDSET
It matters. How a pilot thinks matters, because thought patterns inevitably
affect piloting actions. (Would anyone seriously try to self-teach solo flight
in glass single-seaters in the absence of FAA requirements for dual
instruction in SOMEthing prior to solo/license? My point here is it's pretty
much self-evident to rational people that self-preservation-instinct alone is
sufficient to influence one's thinking to conclude dual instruction in
sailplanes is a good idea. How a person thinks, matters.)

Mindset is as true post-licensing as it is pre-licensing, though arguably
perhaps more subtly so. If you think ridge soaring is no more risky than
thermal soaring, you're more likely to attempt to do both similarly...adding
additional risks to your ridge soaring attempts that a different mindset could
mitigate. Ditto cloud flying vs. VFR flight. Or downwind landings vs. upwind
landings. Etc., etc., etc...
- - - - - -

SPECULATION
I've been doing it for decades, and have never thought myself poorer for it in
knowledge-/insight-gained, or more ill-informed for having indulged.

"But what if you're wrong in your speculative accident conclusions?" some may ask.

Excellent question.

Let's consider a speculative, unintentional stall-spin/departure from
controlled flight scenario.

I've been at the gliderport when a friendly acquaintance died from one. (The
preceding statement is my conclusion; the NTSB added no substantive causative
insight to this particular crash, which you can find under HP-16s). Why it
happened was a mystery to me then, and remains one today, but one more
destroyed glider and one more dead pilot. Another friendly acquaintance - and
high-time power and glider pilot/instructor - died from such in the pattern on
a benign day from the same cause (SZD-59).

Happily I've never had to actually WITNESS a departure from controlled flight
in the pattern, though I HAVE seen a 2-33 (on a dual instruction flight!) hit
a tree on a low approach, and have seen WAY too many inadvertent low
approaches for good health (theirs and mine!). Know what? Most of the
resultant low patterns were NOT suitably modified by the self-inflicting
pilots to mitigate the inherent hazards in them. All could have been of
course. WHY were they not modified? Mindset?

My point here is it doesn't terribly MATTER if Joe Pilot's speculation is
spot-on or not, simply because the speculation has value in and of itself if
it influences Joe Pilot's future thinking (and hence actions) in different
(arguably safer) ways than would likely be the case in the absence of such
speculation. That's a good thing, IMHO.

Who wants to argue - after a pattern crunch, say - that inadvertent,
un-pre-planned, low and slow patterns are safer than "normal patterns"? Or
that the crunch was or was not departure-from-controlled-flight-induced
directly, or indirectly (e.g. by hitting a tree or wires or a fence or
something else)? Of course, the latter distinction is surely critical to an
accurate understanding of any particular accident...but it is NOT critical to
the fact of said crunch, if said crunch arguably would NOT have happened had a
"normal pattern" been flown. There are lessons to be gleaned about the risks
inherent to ALL low patterns from speculative assessment of low pattern crunches.

Would you rather hit a tree, or inadvertently depart from controlled flight,
if fate decrees those are to be the only two options you get from some future
low pattern you (inadvertently, most likely) enter? Personally, I'd rather hit
the tree...but much more to the thinking point is that I never want to
INADVERTENTLY enter a low pattern, and if I DO, then I want to do certain
things beginning the instant I realize I've made such a stupid error. (Anyone
want to chime in w. guesses what those things might be?)

Incidentally, for any readers who think I'm being too harsh in claiming anyone
who enters a low pattern inadvertently is being stupid, this is from someone
who's encountered 3 pattern microbursts in the inter-mountain Rocky Mountain
west...sort of this area's equivalent of falling off an Allegheny or UK ridge,
in available-pattern-time-terms. One of those patterns was entered at 2,500'
agl and eventually included a go-around from the downwind to base turn, and
another was entered at 3k' agl and included ONLY time for 2-360's (in the
clean configuration) that took less than a minute to ground contact. No damage
in any of them (though the first of the three was a crap shoot in
survivability terms). My point here is that "landing patterns" don't begin at
some arbitrary location or altitude agl, they begin when they need to begin,
and Joe Pilot had better begin - ASAP! - doing what that particular pattern
demands.

Mindset matters.

And my pattern mindset began to be influenced by reading about others'
misfortunes - then speculating about what I'd read - well before I obtained my
license. So far, the only stupid pilot tricks I've managed to do in over 1100
patterns have been convenience related. Happily, only one included
(bulkhead-repair-required) glider damage. My speculative conclusion? Pattern
risks taken for convenience reasons are entirely, 100%, avoidable. IOW,
convenience risks - if they don't work out - WILL be a stupid pilot trick.
- - - - - -

It sure would be wonderful if the rest of the 2012 U.S. soaring season doesn't
include any more stupid pilot tricks.

Bob - Captain Harsh - W.

Chris, thanks for expressing what I was trying to get across much more succinctly!

JJ, it isn't that our instructors are necessarily bad, it's the system they are themselves trained in that is flawed.

Walt, yes, there is a lot we could learn from the French - just as there is a lot they could learn from us (economics being one of them, right now!) Think wine, bread, small cars, diet, raising kids (look it up), to name a few. They also build the sexiest looking fighters, IMO!

But it's not only the French who have what appears to be a more structured system of teaching gliding - reading Sailplane & Gliding make me think the British system has a lot to offer, also.

That being said - accident statistics are not that good in those countries, either.

So maybe this is just a damn dangerous sport, and we just have to accept the risk and enjoy it to the max!

Cheers, got to get ready to race today (CD for a local contest in Phoenix).

Fly safe, don't crash.

Kirk
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