On Sunday, June 23, 2013 12:04:42 PM UTC-6, Mike the Strike wrote:
If we are comparing likely attitudes towards safety and operating procedures affected by cultural differences, it might be useful to look at the traffic accident rates in the three countries. When rated at fatalities per billion kilometers, the Brits come in lowest at 5.7, the Germans second at 7..2 and the USA third at 8.5. Eastern Europe is significantly worse, but the real basket case are in South America.



I have to think that the differences in glider launch accident statistics are so large that there has to be a significant contribution from the way that these are reported.



Mike

There could be national differences in reporting but if the problem were under-reporting, then the Germans would have to be the worst offenders by hiding hundreds of serious accidents which would be impossible to do. I trust the German figures much more than those from anyone else. If anyone other than the Germans under-reports, it would actually support the conclusions. OTOH, I can't imagine anyone reporting accidents that didn't happen.

Where distortion is most likely to creep in is due simply to the relative sample sizes. Germany may do over a million winch launches a year making their statistics very meaningful. The UK does only 180,000 launches a year so two or three accidents would skew the ratios. However, when they suffer 12, as the US did with aero tow, that's statistically significant.

BTW, a long list of people have tried to attack my numbers and, so far, they've failed to succeed. I'd be happy for someone to do so but first show me the data. What little new data that has become available actually increases the national differences.