On Tuesday, February 6, 2018 at 5:07:27 PM UTC-5, jfitch wrote:


Well, this discussion has been quite the education for me [snip] The measuring stick for this is: are there more accidents in competition than in normal cross country flight? I believe the answer is yes, meaning the risks are either higher or not being managed.

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I agree that this is a very interesting and useful thread. Regarding the above comment about racing being more dangerous, I actually believe the answer is "yes", there are more accidents in competition soaring. I just don't believe it is related only or predominantly to "points" in anything other than the broadest sense.

This marks my 30th year of racing (hey, I started young), and on balance it's been an amazing journey. One comment you'll hear over and over again goes something like this: "I wouldn't have even taken the glider out of the box on a day like today, yet we just did a 200K task. WOW that was fun!" I can vividly recall a few competition days like that which were incredibly satisfying.

But therein lies the rub. As soon as we fly on anything but the most straightforward, reliable, benign days, we increase the likelihood of landouts (at least those of us who don't have motors). In many parts of the country, fields are not as plentiful or as big as we'd like, and there are rocks, posts, pipes and all sorts of other nasty things hiding in them that can damage our gliders. There are also wires, trees, fences, and other things that can snatch us out of the air and damage the pilot if we misjudge.

Since the decision (or indecision) that leads to attempted landings in marginal fields (for example) typically happen a long time prior to the final event, it suggests to me that we all need to take a big step back to understand the broader risk equation and what we are personally willing to accept or not accept. For example, a good friend of mine who is a competent racing pilot pretty much decided 10 years ago that he will not risk a field landout. Period. That means he’s unlikely to win a contest with a lot of weak weather, yet he still races and enjoys winning some days. I’ve personally made a lot of decisions in the last few years that took me out of the running on any given day (not flying through a heavy rain shower on the ridge, not overflying a 20 mile forest even though there were a few decent looking clouds on the direct route), and I’m happy with those decisions.

In the business world, we talk about Organizational Change Management when we feel the need to make major changes to how a company (or other entity) “works.” One of the accepted truths is that OCM is hard – much harder than just writing rules like “you will not remove safety guards on cutting equipment.” The biggest challenge is communication and education and getting buy-in. In the US, I think the safety talks before flying were a good idea, but the quality and message are pretty variable. If we really want to make it safer, then we ought to invest in communications (high quality video recordings for example along the lines of the ones that Sporty’s or King Schools articulating a few key messages in digestable chunks). Another option is to put a Personal Limits checklist into contest packages (landout, lowest climb, weather minima) and ask pilots to fill them out before the first day and hand them in.. Then, spot check a few during the course of the contest and have the CD/CM call out people who are violating their own stated rules. It’s a culture thing, and changing behavior is just plain hard.

FWIW – I think the above efforts would be a much more valuable contribution from our various competition organizations (Rules Committee, Team Selection Committee, etc.) than continuously debating and fine tuning scoring rules and such.

Erik Mann (P3)