4:1 Ratio of fatal US glider accidents, West vs. East

Using the Mississippi river as the dividing line, a new book on US Glider Accidents reveals the following statistics:

Page 124 chart totals...
----------East West Total
Accidents -124 201 326
Fatalities --15 53 68

38 additional fatalities in the Western US over the same period of time. 15 east, 53 west. Wow!, that is an absolutely shocking figure.

Anyone have any idea how the ratio of fatal glider accidents could be nearly 4:1 west vs. east?

Sincerely,

Sean
F2

We would need to know total # flights east vs west. Could simply be there are more glider flights in the west.

On Monday, January 27, 2014 1:08:23 PM UTC-7, wrote:
We would need to know total # flights east vs west. Could simply be there are more glider flights in the west.

Eastern gliders are still buried under the snow and out west we are flying!

Mike

My thunder has been stolen. We fly WAY more out west.

I'm sure the number of hours flown can easily explain the 4:1 ratio.

We do cross county thermal flights in the winter... 'nuf said.

Knowing the total number of flights for each population would be important, but as a Western pilot I wonder if this reflects the unforgiving nature of mountain flying? It would be helpful to know what kinds of accident these numbers are describing (collision with terrain, for example).

Suggestion for an additional way to look at this data, how many of these Western fatalities involved Eastern pilots flying in unfamiliar, unforgiving terrain?

Chris Young

I don't mean to highjack the thread about East vs West, which btw I do think is interesting, but I am astounded by the number of fatalities in the past 20 yrs. I'm also surprised at the number is almost equal for the first 10 yrs and the second 10. Also the number of 2 place gliders involved seems to be high to me.

On Tuesday, January 28, 2014 7:17:05 PM UTC-5, Casey Cox wrote:
I am astounded by the number of fatalities in the past 20 yrs.

A few years ago, I did a search to find the most dangerous common activities. Underground coal mining was the worst. Flying gliders is even worse.

The most amazing thing for me to try to understand is who we are. Well to do, educated, the movers and shakers.

OTOH, I am convinced, the primary problem is a fundamental lack of knowledge, and an unwillingness to make the effort to learn.

Today I started a thread on my newsletter to try to help. Sign up free at www.eglider.org if you are interested.

Tom Knauff

A few years ago, I did a search to find the most dangerous common activities. Underground coal mining was the worst. Flying gliders is even worse.



The most amazing thing for me to try to understand is who we are. Well to do, educated, the movers and shakers.


Even more revealing would be to show the number of fatalities for CFIG, club presidents, etc. Many are high hour, experienced pilots.
THAT is what scares me! I don't get it.

I created something a while ago which might be of interest to this thread:

https://www.google.com/fusiontables/...gvXvIAKjj_Qb9A

I got the data from the NTSB (searching on aircraft type glider). There are a few errors in the data, e.g. accidents in the middle of the Atlantic because the NTSB has the wrong latitude/longitude.

If there is enough interest, I could update the map with a different time range, and add tweaks like links to the full reports on the NTSB site. This was literally a 15 minute effort (I work for a Google competitor in the mapping industry, so I wanted to see how Google's APIs worked :-)).

Hope it helps the discussion!

Cheers,
-Mark

(Forgot to mention that the "Map of Latitude" tab is the interesting tab on my document... the spreadsheet posted earlier in this thread has the same or more raw data)

Cheers,
-Mark