SSA 2018 Rules Finish Penalty

John, hate to say it, but crashes are innevitable when people with large egos are involved in any sort of racing. We will never be able to "legislate" absolute safety, and guys will forever take risks to win. Sure some rule making is common sense based. But, there is an ever increasing trend to try to substitute rules for experience. It has never worked.

A close look at your very own data in the link you posted shows that the accidents that were fatal were stall spin. Anyone who has a smiggen of aeronautical sense, if screwing up a final glide and running out of options, will put there ship down straight ahead, you gotta work hard at killing yourself setting your ship down even into the trees if it is done in a controlled fashion. Two of the accidents were stall spin while trying to do a pattern, most likely while low, another screw up totally preventable.

As your data shows, the greatest combined source of accidents is found in off field landings and midairs. If that is the case, where are all the rules/regs to mitigate those accidents? I think what no one wants to say is accidents close to the field are publicity attractors, negative that is, and the concern is about our image and possible FAA intervention.

Yes we had fatalities during the "good old days " 70's-80's-90's. I witnessed a few myself, but things are not safer now. That is a fallacy. We had 60 sometimes 70 sailplanes racing a single national and absolutely huge regionals as well. We have 1/3 of that now with an accident rate that has not decreased in pace with the shrinking participation. Racing has not gotten safer. There is so much inner cockpit distraction and blind dependance on, at times, overly optomistic flight computers, that guys are stretching way beyond their natural abilities, much more so than when we had to make educated guesses based on what our asses were telling us.

A very good case can be made emphatically and statistically that racing is more dangerous today, due to the above mentioned point as well as the fact that performance has progressed to the point where an off field landing is such a rare occurrence guys do not have the experience level they need in their ship to safely make an off field landing, which used to be a normal occurrence in any contest.