Hard Deck

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

When ACA decided "enough is enough" with the stupid ****, we got together and started to rethink safety from all angles. We looked at every single accident and near accident/incident across multiple dimensions (pilot experience, weather, terrain, etc.) As mentioned upstream, one of our single biggest findings was that too many pilots are cavalier about XC flight and outlandings, especially in areas of challenging terrain. Another obvious issue was guys flying in really challenging weather (which often comes along with good/great ridge days).

We're making strides in education, club guidelines, etc. But one thing I can see as an instructor is that the US does a LOT less in terms of formal XC training than what I've seen flying at clubs in Europe. For example, you can be a CFI-G in the US never having been outside gliding range of the home field. In the UK, at least Basic and Full instructors have to have a Silver badge (which is still fairly minimal, but at least it's something).

Again - as mentioned up thread - I really think it's a mistake that we don't think more about experience-level competition rather than glider class. What's perfectly safe for someone with decades of competition experience across a wide range of conditions may not be at all safe for someone who just got his Silver badge two weeks before the comp. Adjusting tasking and task parameters to be a bit more conservative for the newbies won't make it any less fun.

And to ND's comment above - it's one thing to take someone with a gold badge and 20 significant XC flights under his/her belt and put them up against a Category 1 pilot. But putting a 50 hour pilot with a freshly minted Silver into the mix is a recipe for disaster IMO.

I see a lot of invalid comparisons in this discussion.Â* How many
airliners or GA aircraft/pilots run ridges, fly mountain wave, etc.?Â*
And to say that, since only one crash occurred at a contest with a 500'
finish limit, makes that safer is ludicrous.Â* In the example stated
there were only 3 crashes total!Â* Anyone with a basic knowledge of
probability would not make any assumption based on a set of three
occurrences.

After 200 odd replies to this thread (is that some sort of record?),
nothing has been settled.Â* What a waste of time.

On 2/4/2018 8:49 AM, 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

--
Dan, 5J

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

On Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 8:21:06 AM UTC-8, Dan Marotta wrote:
Anyone with a basic knowledge of
probability would not make any assumption based on a set of three
occurrences.


The most important part of any statistical analysis in making sure you're picking the right data to analyze, and that it's representative of the things you're trying to measure. Rare, catastrophic events are easy to misunderstand or rationalize. You can't go at them assuming you know the answer already or you will most likely end up with the wrong analysis and/or wrong conclusion. Glider pilots seem to be particularly prone to that - sometimes right but never uncertain!

Andy Blackburn
9B

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 Sunday, February 4, 2018 at 10:49:36 AM UTC-5, John Cochrane wrote:
"what a bozo, I wouldn't do that."

Right. What you'll be doing on the way to your next wgc. Hope they don't stick you with a direct finish.

T8

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 Saturday, February 3, 2018 at 2:28:59 PM UTC-5, John Cochrane wrote:
Stupid stuff usually does not win contests. Our winners are tremendously talented pilots. Occasional sporting risks are part of the game. One landout, aborted flight through thunderstorm, etc. will lose a contest. So, usually, avoid such problems. But when you have to go, you have to go.

The hard deck case is not about winners doing dumb things while the rest of us sane people sit around and grumble. It's about the many risks that non-winners seem to take when the points clock is on, and do not take when the points clock is off.

It's an interesting contrast. Everywhere else in aviation we seem to have this concept. Minimums for an IFR approach, or you go around, are pretty hard and fast. I don't see vast complaining about this encroachment on the pilots' freedom or judgement.

The FAA's rule which is even a law against busting minimums, with penalties. The hard deck proposes no such force or penalty. It would be as if airlines gave pilots a $1000 bonus for landing on time, no matter what the weather, and we are proposing, hey, why don't we take the bonus off the table when reported cloudbase is below 500 feet.

John Cochrane

John,

I disagree that folks at 500 feet are thinking about points. in your safety analysis posted very far above, you showed a guy thermalling very low in stone valley, just to the northwest side of stone mountain. i've landed out there before. the guy wasn't circling at 400 feet thinking, "gee i better make this work or i'll lose all those speed points." he was thinking he better make that bubble work because he had nowhere else to go. his landing options were poor, he wasn't fighting for points, he was trying to stay out of a field. a hard deck doesn't accomplish anything to stop this situation from evolving.

points are on people's minds at 1500 feet when they think "man, i'm out of a good working band, and this is gonna slow me down." 1000 feet later, they aren't thinking about points anymore. any sensible pilot has already been thinking about landing options, and has a plan in mind. if it's a rock solid plan they might try circling. if it's not, they still might try circling, because it's more attractive than what's on the ground. the presence of a hard deck doesn't factor into the decision making process here.

for one reason or another, people will still attempt circles below it, guaranteed. So if it isn't correcting a safety related behavior, and we agree that it won't affect the scoresheet very much, what does a hard deck accomplish, and what's the point?

for me it's a different discussion from the finish line thing. i mentioned it earlier, but i'm throwing that aside, not least because it's still possible to have one. i keep responding because i don't think the hard deck solves any problem at all. what would be more effective would be a powerpoint presentation at the contest briefing about low saves, circling low, safety, and know areas of chancy landing options. maybe with a few pictures of broken gliders, nasty fields people had to squeeze into, and x-rays of a broken collarbone from a groundloop after a rushed forced landing. in particular there's a youtube video of a really last minute pattern and scary landing floating around. this sort of media is a better motivator than someone being reminded halfway through their pattern that they just lost all their points. i'll smash the SUA warning on downwind, going, "yeah great, thanks john, don't care right now."

Because that's what's going to happen. the majority of folks will get a SUA warning halfway through their pattern. they will have already committed to landing. is that the kind of distraction you want to introduce into the cockpit when there are much more pressing matters to attend to?

I think its a no-brainer.

it's hard to convey tone-of-voice online. Written with all due respect!

ND

Here is a little rambling rant I wanted to get off my mind:
This has been a very interesting thread with a lot of good information and statistics put forth.
What this has driven home for me is, really, how dangerous this sport of cross country sailplane flying really is. It is hard to attract new pilots to this cross country aspect of Soaring because it is a reality that landing off airport is so dangerous in alot of areas we fly. I'm only familiar with the area west of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, never been gliding in the east or the midwest or the south. I mainly fly out of Salida, Parowan, Nephi and Ely and at my home site of Telluride. In 20 + years of going cross country in a sailplane I have only put it into a field once, flying out of Logan, and it was a unworked semi clearing that was really rough. I was surprised that my glider was OK after I got out, super rough.
That makes me think that's why alot of Pilots don't really like assigned tasks, unless there carefully designed to fly airport to airport. As several posts have made clear for various reasons off airport landings are SO dangerous. Look at Blairstown's statistics, scary.
TAT days at least give you a choice on where to go as far as safety is concerned.
One particularly crazy area we send pilots on competition tasks IMHO is the area SE out of Parowan between Cedar City and Kanab, over Zion National park. I have been so scared out there several times. You go down in there and you are going to get killed, for sure. Yet they call tasks over it. Sure you can go around it, but it is a long way around, but you do have that choice of course.
This hard deck proposal that started this thread has turned out to be fairly complex. Another layer of rules when we are trying to get away from more rules.
It is clear that alot of nasty accidents are caused by pilots desperate not to land out in a field. Circling very low and trying not to land, and then either stalling and spinning or blowing the approach. I am guilty of this low level circling too. Last year out of Nephi I had a very low save over the Yuba Reservoir while setting up to land. It was a long series of events that led to me being a couple of hundred feet off the ground going into a unknown potential landing site, on the dirt road going into the reservoir.It looked doable from the air but who knows, all I thought was road landings often go bad. Baby Jesus got me out of that one.
I don't think any new rule is going to change this behavior. Us guys that are still alive have to be as careful as possible. Cross Country Soaring is super fun when its going well, bombing down cloudstreets at 17K with your friends is the best, but we have to remember that when close to the ground, you are one, quick, easy to make mistake from getting killed.
Keep the speed up and be careful, especially when close to the ground, either taking off, ridge soaring or landing.
And try to stay of of those fields that you don't know about first hand.

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.