On Oct 14, 10:05*am, Liam wrote:
A worthwhile exercise. *I suspect someone flying long flights over the
Sierras is more likely to post to OLC than someone flying 100km
flights out of Peoria, and the former is also much more likely to get
killed. *I think 1/1000 is a lower bound for pilots flying XC out
west.

How I justify still flying:

Depending on your age,
a 1/1000 chance of dying in the next year is really not all that bad.
The point is,
we greatly tend, psychologically, to underestimate our chances of
dying of
numerous other causes of death besides gliding in a given year. We
all know some
80 year old or even 90 year old friends and relatives, and forget how
relatively rare they actually are, and how many members of the age
related peer group they were born with are not around any longer. We
kind of assume if we eat right and don't get in an accident, we'll be
around at 80-90 too. So we get really sad when somebody dies at age 60
in an accident, and might decide to give up flying because of the
1/1000 chance we might die from flying in the next year.

If you study the U.S. Social Security Actuarial tables of 2007:

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

For a 63 year old male, not too far off from an average glider
pilot, your chances of dying in the next year of any of the many
other possible causes (I suppose that includes the 5-11 glider pilots
who die gliding each year in the U.S.) is about 14/1000.

There is a rule called the Gompertz law that says that the chance
of dying of any cause in the next year doubles with every 8 years of
age.

So if you are still flying at the age of 85, you have about about a
1/10
chance of dying in the next year just from the fact that you're still
alive at all. It only goes up another 1/1000 if you still fly
(assuming 85
y/o OLC pilots die at the overall average rate as other OLC pilots).
But maybe if you're still flying at age 63, would be better to
fly with other age 63+ passengers, so just in case something happens,
you
don't take along somebody with a better life expectancy with you, like
a healthy 19 y/o male who might have only had a 1/1000 chance of dying
in the next year
from all causes.