On Sunday, December 1, 2019 at 3:57:19 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
Tom,

I take your points. I think if we sat down and went through accident reports together we'd probably agree more than we disagree on the degree to which pilot error is a significant factor. Still, a lot of very good stick and rudder guys end up in very bad or fatal accidents.

My Dad broke his back hitting power lines strung between two trees on the approach end of a road after experiencing 10 knots of sink for a long while on final glide into Hobbs at the Standard Class Nationals in the 80s. Another very skilled fighter pilot and US WGC Team pilot on that same day flew through the same bad air leading to his only landable option requiring him to put the glider between the high wires and the low wires on the electrical poles at the airpot boundary (for a long time he had a picture of the event above his desk at home as a reminder - maybe he still does). I actually knew another fighter pilot/glider pilot who hit a tree in a field and was killed by the spar when the wing came apart - it was a tight situation and there were a whole series of decisions that put him in a field with a tree in it. He thought he could maneuver around it...but couldn't. Those all end up as pilot error in one way or another I suppose - but with a lot of extenuating circumstances - who counts on 5 miles of 10-knot sink no matter which way you go? Okay maybe that's not the typical situation for a stall/spin turning final in a Grob at the home airport, but it happens a fair amount I think.

The good advice is maintain your margins and try to think ahead. I just add to that the somewhat paranoid idea that everything could go to hell in ways that I hadn't imagined and add more margin - maybe more than the average pilot. I hope that it helps me stay safe, but I remain open to the idea that I can make a bad assumption, lose my focus or that my margins might be insufficient in some circumstance.

Mostly I fly airport to airport - but of course I have not inspected every airport in the waypoint database and in the desert that can sometimes present a problem. Occasionally I'll commit to a field landing if I know the area, but sometime your out is 20-30 miles away and I have not walked every field in the task area - though I walk my share.

The thing that always gets my attention is when the only lift is weak on a ridge line and the alternative is to land in a field down in the valley do I try to work it or not. Is it really safer to put it in a field? Figure 8's transitioning to circling, keeping an eye on the wind, keeping the speed up, adjusting for the drift while looking over your shoulder before you commit to the downwind turn into the ridge. It's a high workload situation and it has caught a fair number of very experienced pilots that I respected. Knowing that makes me feel very humble.

Okay, that's it for this afternoon. Back to other things...

Andy


On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 2:53:54 PM UTC-8, 2G wrote:
On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 12:44:05 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
I think you have a much stronger sense that you are master of your destiny than many of us. I've certainly read the stall-spin stories of pilots in benign-handling trainers on a clear, windless day simply misjudging the turn to final by getting too low and ruddering the turn until they depart the airplane. It happens and it's about as close to 100% pilot error and poor airmanship as you can get. There are a number of those in the public record. I just think many cases are more complex than that and sit at the end of an accumulation of decisions where the pilot estimates wrong on which is the less-risky choice to make. I think this is particularly true if you are pushing for performance - you make risk-reward tradeoffs all the time and many of those are based on a sample of experience that is just insufficient for the range of situations that randomness can throw at you - but they work out 99.9% of the time - you just don't know if it's 99.9% or 99.999% and over time that matters.

Example: The Ethiopian 737MAX flight crew, faced with runaway trim and control forces too high to hold the nose up elected to re-engage the MCAS system to get electric trim back. It turned out not to help and lot of people died. It is possible that if they'd made the exact right choices at the exact right time they might've saved the aircraft, so is the fact that they failed '****-poor airmanship' or something more complex? They knew that MCAS-induced trim runaway was possible from the prior accident only weeks before. There was a much-criticized NYT op-ed that basically called the Ethiopian crew bad pilots. Most other experts said the situation was one that put so much stress on the crew that it's not reasonable to expect airmanship should be the correct solution to the problem, even if airmanship could've saved it. With perfect airmanship Sully could've gotten his A320 back to Laguardia, so was landing in the Hudson ****-poor airmanship? After all, he destroyed an airplane. I see more gray out there than you do and it give me pause.

Which brings me to one final thought. There is also a human factors aspect of all of this. My personal experience is that there are a number of pilots with an extremely strong "internal locus of control". In their own estimation, they know exactly what the airplane will do, are excellent at reading the weather and always keep perfectly sufficient margins. Many (not all) of this personality type are hostile to feedback or thought that challenges that internal view. It's more than a handful of pilots I've encountered who, when confronted with feedback that they cut another pilot off in a thermal (or other similar behavior) responded with what amounted to "I'm fine - if you don't like it get out of my way". This, too, has given me pause, and in more than one case individuals have been encouraged to seek other forms of entertainment - particularly in the racing community. So, what happens to the pilot who is absolutely certain that his margins are good and he's read the weather right, configured the aircraft properly, etc. when a flying situation gets outside of their rock-solid belief system of what might happen? Do they go into denial or are they flexible in their view that they may have miscalculated something? Since many accidents are based on accumulations of decisions, the ability to re-estimate one's assumptions is a critical personality trait in breaking the potential accident chain.

Skill certainly counts, but so does attitude. It might be more humility than skill that saves your life.

Andy Blackburn
9B

On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 9:41:14 AM UTC-8, 2G wrote:

One point I will agree with you on is that you can't reduce all of your risks to zero - for example, if someone comes at you from your blind position with tunnel vision, it's damn hard to avoid a mid-air (it's happened to me, but I did avoid him). Nonetheless, the accident reports are replete with examples of ****-poor airmanship that are totally avoidable, including Masak's.

Tom

Andy,

I am getting the strong sense of deflection from my basic premise. First off, I am not talking about a complex airliner accident which involves a clear design error on the part of the manufacturer (Boeing). I know Boeing engineers, and they are saying that Boeing screwed up. To blame the pilots for this is far more than a stretch.

Second, the article I think you are referring to (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/b...sh-school.html) made no such claim. In fact, it lauds the Ethiopian flight school. It only mentioned the copilots flight time (200 hr), which is a matter of fact.

Third, trying to analyze the difference between 99.9% (1 in 1000) and 99.999% (1 in 100,000) is a fool's errand. In a good year, I might have 40 flights, 50 tops. 1 in 1000 means it will take forty to fifty years to occur, which MIGHT be once in my lifetime, at best. 1 in 100,000 means forget it: it's not important. I am talking about situations that have a reasonable chance of occurring on a flight, like 1 in 10 or 1 in 100. Take Masak's accident; as he was gliding toward the ridge line he had to see the ridge climbing on his canopy; what did he think the odds were of clearing the ridge, 1 in 2 if that? But he kept pressing on until he could see that he was BELOW the tree tops and had NO chance of clearing them. That delayed decision making process is why I categorize the accident cause as a CFIT; the stall/spin was merely a last second desperation maneuver with no chance of success.. This accident was TOTALLY AVOIDABLE, yet it happened to a high-time, skilled pilot flying in a familiar area!

Other types of fatal avoidable accidents include hitting the only tree in field during a landout, flying IFR in the mountains and stall/spins in the pattern. Yes, all of these have occurred in the last two years to glider pilots, two to commercial pilots (one of those carrying a paying passenger).

I don't want to over-think things here - it actually is a pretty basic concept. If you have poor stick and rudder skills, or poor decision making skills, or both, you are an accident waiting to happen.

Tom

Andy,

I just looked at the fatal accidents for the last two years to find a common thread. That thread was ****-poor airmanship. Is that to say that there are exceptions that prove the rule? The answer is yes, there are ALWAYS exceptions, but I don't fixate on them to the point of losing sight of the principal conclusion: good airmanship goes a long ways in preventing accidents. I honestly don't understand why this is so controversial, everybody should be saying "Yup, that's a good point."

Where I fly in Nevada there are few airports and they are a long way apart, and the majority of those I wouldn't attempt landing on anyway. Fields are actually a safer option. But ANY field would be better than the brush. I have another saying: you can either make the decision, or the decision will be made for you, and you probably won't be pleased with the outcome. Waiting until the last moment to make the decision is not a good idea.

Tom