On 1/27/2018 12:00 PM, Dave Nadler wrote:

Germane lead-in info snipped...

If you are not absolutely clear how people get killed blindly following
other pilots, you may want to read:
http://www.nadler.com/public/Nadler_...g_May_1987.pdf

Well worth (re-)absorbing; I just did it for about the tenth time. And at the
(probably WAY too high) risk of having sardonic humor be completely
misinterpreted...arithmetic says there was a 1.8% *improvement* from 1985 to
1986 in that particular regional contest's broken ship safety stats. (1985 -
4/31; 1986 5/45) So today, 30-some years later and continuing the same
improvement rate, that particular contest should be darn near 60%
"ship-safer," no? Insurance rates plummet wildly!!! (Not!)

More seriously, IMO the rather amorphous thought, "I NEED to make an active
decision!" if incorporated into every soaring pilot's general arsenal, would
go a long way to improving our collective safety record. (I forget whether it
was former World Champion AJ Smith or George Moffat who pithily said
[paraphrasing]: If you're not making at least one active decision every 60
seconds, you're [losing time, screwing the pooch, etc.].)

*Actively* making the decision to (say) switch from "doing something else" to
"entering my pre-planned pattern for my pre-selected field NOW!" is the
pilot's responsibility...to him/herself, to their family, to their friends, to
the soaring community at large, to the ship. (Even so, I doubt whether repair
shop proprietors need fear going out of business from lack of work.) Whether
"NOW" occurs at (say) 800' agl above the home field or somewhere else is by
comparison relatively unimportant. Hard deck (whether yours or contest
management's), terrain-induced concern or fear, instructor's number, whatever
- getting into the habit of ALWAYS making that sort of in-flight decision
each flight - maybe even more than once, as you scratch along - surely is more
safety important (to Joe Pilot anyway) than is not forgetting to lower the
gear, something about which every retract pilot tries to obsess over at one
time or another in their flying career. Who'd'a thunk a shoe company ad would
ever have real-world applicability to the soaring world? Just do it! :-)

Bob W.

---
This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
http://www.avg.com