How dangerous is soaring?

If we say YES,
lets ask ourselves , what we did to improve our luck factor recently ?
-We constantly change the rules (in US) for safety
-Europans developed Flarm
But nothing was changed with the plane.
Everybody seems to be happy with disillusioned idea of safety cockpit.
We don't have airbags, balllistic chutes, tail mounted bungee
arresting harpoons,
second chance ex katiusha miniature rocket engines to get us out of
trouble,
power traffic avoidance low energy systems ,etc.

..Ryszard Krolikowski (RW)

I absolutely disagree, and I stand my point (and manner).

Once you stop thinking about the risk, you become one.

However, if the thinking about the risk starts to intimidate you, you are in
the wrong place.

Bert

"Kloudy via AviationKB.com" u33403@uwe wrote in message
news:7a860aefd44d3@uwe...
Bert Willing wrote:
Fairly stupid comment.


uh, not really.

But despite your poor manner I will elucidate for our thread host.

One year several friends and acquaintances died around me in soaring
accidents.
The year my daughter was born.
Everytime I climbed into the plane I began thinking about how the small
increase in risk to my safety became more acute to those counting on me.
The
results of those risks were suddenly clearer, close and personal.
I thought about my friends.
I thought about my family.
Being too careful was starting to interfere with fluid responses to my
piloting.

I was thinking too much. Risk increased.

I Quit for 15 years to reduce the probability of injury in the interest of
those relying on my health.

Returned to soaring as our social/family/financial situation matured.

My mind is not occupied outside the task of piloting anymore.

Too much analysis can be a hazard.

--
Message posted via AviationKB.com
http://www.aviationkb.com/Uwe/Forums...aring/200710/1

On Oct 31, 9:18 am, Chip Bearden wrote:
Soaring is riskier than driving a car. Competition soaring and
aggressive cross-country soaring are riskier, still, although they are
typically practiced by more experienced pilots who should (key word)
know how to manage those risks. There's a good article about safety
and risk by former World Champion Bruno Gantenbrink on DG's Web site:http://www.dg-flugzeugbau.de/index-e.html. If you fly cross-country or
competitively and haven't read it, please do.

I grew up mouthing the cliche (an international one, apparently, based
on Bruno's article) that the most dangerous part of soaring was the
drive to the airport. In fact, flying is the most dangerous part. In
40+ years of soaring, I've lost quite a few friends and acquaintances
to glider crashes, including my father and my best friend, both highly
experienced pilots. I've been first on the scene at fatal crashes. I
think about the potential downside consequences of soaring before
every contest and often when driving to the gliderport (although,
oddly, seldom when I'm flying). I've got two 13-year-old daughters who
would be devasted if something happened to me while flying.

Yet I continue to fly. Soaring is the most fulfilling, exciting,
rewarding activity I participate in, and I feel more alive for it.
Nothing matches the exhilaration of completing a task or an ambitious
flight knowing I've flown well. And I'm honest enough to admit that if
soaring were completely risk free, it wouldn't have the same appeal. I
suspect more than a few of my fellow pilots share this "condition"
although I would describe none of them as thrill seekers or dare
devils.

Yet I do everything I can to minimize the risks balanced against my
desire to compete and fly cross country. I bought my current glider
because it had a safety cockpit and impact-absorbing landing gear. I
equipped it with a canopy wire deflector bar, an ELT, a 6-point safety
harness, a rear-view mirror, and more than a gallon of easily
accessible drinking water. All this was to keep me out of trouble and
to help me survive trouble if it occurs. I'm considering installing a
transponder or a portable collision avoidance device to reduce what I
think is my biggest risk currently--being hit by a power plane in the
busy airspace where I fly west of New York City. I'm probably more
cautious than some. I know my limits and don't knowingly exceed them.

Soaring isn't for everyone. One pilot I know, a good one, dropped out
of soaring after his wife got sick and died. As much as he loved
soaring, his children were young and he didn't feel it was fair to
them to continue something that increased the risk they might end up
losing both parents. He intends to get back in the game when they're
older. I think he made the right call for him.

I confess that when I was in my 20s, I not only mouthed the cliche
about driving being more dangerous than flying, but I glorified the
risks that even then I acknowledged existed in order to enhance the
sense that I was doing something special, something extreme, something
most people would never experience. Now in my 50s, I see that part of
the appeal of soaring is the ability to push myself up against the
edge of the cliff, look over it, and then back away. I don't need or
want the risk that a power pilot flying head down and locked will plow
into me from behind (as nearly happened a few months ago) or the risk
that someone above me in the gaggle will make a mistake and spin down
through my altitude (as happened a few years ago). The challenge is to
work with the risks I can control. It's the ones I can't control--and
I'd be in denial if I said they didn't exist--that trouble me. There
are enough of those, plus the risk that I will make a bad mistake
someday (I'm not in denial about that, either), to remind me that
soaring is inherently risky compared with most of the other things I
do. To date, those risks are not sufficient to cause me to quit
soaring. But we're all different and what works for me may not apply
to anyone else.

Chip Bearden
ASW 24 "JB"
USA

Chip,

Thanks for your comments, all well put.

I also lost my father in a soaring accident, in the 1979 US
nationals. He was an experience pilot and instructor and we just
don't know what happened.

I stepped into soaring 25 years later as my family matured and I
couldn't resist the enticement any longer. My family is aware of the
risks, as am I. We accept that something may happen to any of us on
any given day, most likely not even related to soaring.

I agree with most of the comments relating to managing risk. I try to
do all I can to understand the sources of risk. Read accident reports,
analysis the actions of other pilots around me, and introspectively
evaluate my own errors and limitations. As an instructor I am
constantly exposed to "common" errors and thought processes that lead
to increased risk. Whenever I'm aware of a potential for increased
risk, I narrow my tolerances and refrain from approaching the edges of
my skills. The point here is to maintain the self-awareness to
recognize the change in risk.

Not only in soaring but in just about every life activity there is a
need for situational awareness. We see it everyday on the highway
with the the casual driver that makes an inappropriate lane change,
for example. In aviation we are particularly sensitive to the need
for situational awareness as the inherent risks are indeed greater. I
feel that one of my greatest challenges, as an instructor, is to
develop in my students the abilitiy to evaluate their situation and be
aware of the currently available options for action. In my experience
it is much more difficult than teaching someone to control the
aircraft, navigate, communicate, or any of the other tasks that are
evaulated in a pilot test or flight review.

I've probably nattered too long.

Mike

On 31 Oct, 23:08, jeplane wrote:
On Oct 31, 2:11 pm, Marc Ramsey wrote:

How many cars are on the roads you use to get to the gliderport?
How many gliders fly at at the gliderport?

So you are telling me driving is safer than flying? Not sure if I
would drive or fly with you!...:-)

There are about 30,000,000 licensed drivers in the UK. About 3,000
people get killed on the roads every year. That's 1 fatality per
10,000 drivers.

From memory, there are about 5,000 members of UK gliding clubs. About
2 - 3 people get killed gliding per year, on average. That's 1
fatality per 2,500 pilots.

The everage driver does 10,000 miles per annum, which is 200 hours at
50mph. The average gliding club member does something like 10 hours
per annum.

So that's 1 fatality per 2,000,000 driver-hours against 1 fatality per
25,000 pilot-hours.

I'd welcome correction on the figures - I'm doing this from memory of
stuff I looked up ~10 years ago, but I'd be very surprised if driving
risk came within an order of magnitude of soaring risk.

Ian

On 1 Nov, 00:41, Bob Kuykendall wrote:

Observe that the numbers for gliders are 19.45 accidents per 100,000
hours flown, with 5.07 fatal accidents per 100,000 hours.

Coo. And I just estimated (in another post before seeing this) a
fatality every 25,000 pilot hours in the UK.

Ian

On 1 Nov, 08:26, "Bert Willing"
wrote:
I absolutely disagree, and I stand my point (and manner).

Once you stop thinking about the risk, you become one.

However, if the thinking about the risk starts to intimidate you, you are in
the wrong place.

I stopped flying for a while because I could only fly midweek and
there were just too many near-misses with military aircraft at my
(then) club. Personal best: a Tornado around two wingspans away, at
the same height. Intimidated? You bet I was.

Ian

On 31 Oct, 19:11, 1LK wrote:

Not exactly. The odds ratio applies to any point in time; it's
neither cumulative or additive. I have a 98.75% chance of being here
tomorrow; on a day a year from now I'll have roughly the same odds of
being here a day after that.

If you have a 98.75% chance of being here tomorrow, then you have a
98.75% x 98.75% chance of being here a day after that, a 98.75% x
98.75% x 98.75% chance of seeing Sunday and so on.

Sure, /if/ you make it to 1st November 2008 you have a 98.75% chance
of making it to 2nd ... but there's only a 1% chance, on these
figures, that you'll put it to the test.

Ian

On Nov 1, 9:26 am, Ian wrote:
I stopped flying for a while because I could only fly midweek and
there were just too many near-misses with military aircraft at my
(then) club. Personal best: a Tornado around two wingspans away, at
the same height. Intimidated? You bet I was.

EEK! Which (ex) club, if you don't mind me asking.
And I thought I was quite close enough to B1s maybe 5 miles away,
or C130s at my altitude and where I could count the individual
cockpit window panes.

I've also heard a story of a B52 lining up on the club's runway
(wheels down, wing root lights) before realising its mistake
and peeling off.

And I did witness some "interesting" commercial airliner and glider
movements at Lasham, back in the 70s.

Is there room in a B1/B52/C130/Tornado for a FLARM? :}

On Oct 31, 7:11 pm, 1LK wrote:
Not exactly. The odds ratio applies to any point in time; it's
neither cumulative or additive. I have a 98.75% chance of being here
tomorrow; on a day a year from now I'll have roughly the same odds of
being here a day after that.

Think of it like tossing a coin to see whether you live. The
probability
of each toss being "heads" is 0.5, and is independent of the previous
results.

To stay alive for a week, you have to toss "heads" 7 times in a row,
and the probability of that is 0.5 ^ 7 = 0.078125 = 1 in 128

Personally, I hope you have more than a 0.9875 ^ 365 chance of
being alive in a year. (i.e. 0.01014 or 1 in 98).

Of course, if you are still alive in a year, there would be the same
chance (0.9875) that you would be alive in a year and a day.

I used to fly in Northern Germany during the time where there was still the
Berlin Wall. My personal best was an F4 diving to avoid me and passing
something like 20m below me.

There has been more than one occasion that I was intimidated in-flight (as
well as on the road), but it didn't scare me off, because the general risk
at that time to be run over by a fighter aircraft at that time was something
I accepted.

"Ian" wrote in message
oups.com...
On 1 Nov, 08:26, "Bert Willing"
wrote:
I absolutely disagree, and I stand my point (and manner).

Once you stop thinking about the risk, you become one.

However, if the thinking about the risk starts to intimidate you, you are
in
the wrong place.

I stopped flying for a while because I could only fly midweek and
there were just too many near-misses with military aircraft at my
(then) club. Personal best: a Tornado around two wingspans away, at
the same height. Intimidated? You bet I was.

Ian