On Monday, January 27, 2014 10:41:36 PM UTC-8, bumper wrote:

All - Here is a link to a Google Docs spreadsheet with fatal accident (tabs for summary as well as details). Each is categorized by phase of flight and type of accident - these are my interpretation from the NTSB reports. If there were multiple categories I went with the initiating cause (e.g. loss of control leading to structural breakup - there are several of these). The report IDs are included in the detail so you can look each one up. It is for the past 20 years (1994-2013 calendar years). There is a tab for ALL glider midairs similarly classified as well as type of flight.

I focused of fatal accidents since West showed a greater discrepancy here with more than twice the lethality of accidents in the East. The summary shows that much of the difference between West and East seems to be consistent with the more extreme flying in the west - there are a lot more accidents associated with in-flight stall/spin, flight into terrain and loss of control in all flight phases.

I have the FAA registration database sorted by state as well as OLC flights for 2013 by SSA region so I should be able to come up with some indicators of whether these higher accident numbers are associated with larger numbers of gliders or glider (OLC) flights in the west versus east.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...mc&usp=sharing