Steve Koerner wrote on 10/1/2018 1:06 PM:
I'm sick and tired of reading about glider crashes and never knowing what actually happened. We badly need to be able to learn from the misfortune of our soaring compadres.

The obvious answer is that we all have a camera mounted over our right shoulder that will simultaneously monitor the scene out the front canopy, monitor the panel instruments and monitor the pilot's flight inputs. .
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No more mysteries! We need to know what is causing our accidents so we have a chance to fix the problems.

There is always the possibility of a medical event, which is hard to discern from
examining the flight trace. A camera on the panel or glare shield, aimed at the
pilot, and recording in a, say, 20 minute loop would make it much more likely a
medical event (including oxygen issues) would be discovered.

The camera could start automatically when the panel power was turned on, and a
single push of a button on it could erase the video after landing. That would
allow the pilot to protect privacy in non-accident landings.

Maybe we could all wear Apple Watches (or similar), to monitor our vitals as we
flew? A smartphone could store and process the info, perhaps alerting us to
dangerous situations, like too high or too low pulse rates, low oxygen saturation,
and even EKG events. I suspect this idea is too far-fetched compare to the "pilot
cam".

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1
- "Transponders in Sailplanes - Dec 2014a" also ADS-B, PCAS, Flarm

http://soaringsafety.org/prevention/...anes-2014A.pdf