On Mar 3, 2016, at 8:44 AM, Peter (PCS3) <p...@internode.on.net> wrote: > As an L2 instructor, I teach that glider pilots have to be flexible and not > fixate on landing on the RWY they took off on. I also quote that we had a > spin in and death at our airfield of a pilot who was flying with RAA. His > beautiful self constructed glider had a motor in it and he flew low past one > runway to join the duty runway and spun in on joining downwind. :-( :-(
Flexibility is part of it, decision-making is another. And it isn’t even cockpit decision-making. Aviation in small airplanes has an accident rate roughly equivalent to motorcycle riding. To my mind (which could be very wrong), there’s a difference between riding motorbikes and flying, in that I think motorcyclists have less agency, which means they’re more susceptible to accidents that they don’t contribute to. That is: you can be the best motorcyclist in the world and still get randomly run off the road by a B-double, but aircraft accidents tend to result from the actions, inactions, and decision-making chains of aircrew. So I look at the categorizations of aircraft accident data, and I make decisions from my lounge room which affect my risk exposure, and the tradeoffs I’m willing to make. For example: There’s a disproportionate number of aircraft accidents resulting from low-flying; I choose not to do that. VFR into IMC has always been a problem; so I’m conservative about weather, I bought an autopilot, and I undertook additional instrument flying training so that if I end up in IMC it’s an inconvenience rather than a loss-of-control event. There appears to be a peak of “losing control on the runway” accidents; so I’m probably one of the few non-trainee licensed pilots who goes out for sessions of circuit bashing, to maintain proficiency by doing 30 landings in a month instead of the 6 or 8 I’d otherwise typically do in a month of weekends. Losing control in flight is another one; I went out and got an aerobatics rating, and do recurrent training there too. In gliders, the risk of a midair collision is significantly higher in comps; so I chose not to fly comps. The general idea is that I can understand that flying is risky, but make decisions about which risk factors I’ll expose myself to. As I gain knowledge of risks and/or apply countermeasures, my willingness to expose myself to them can (and does) change. Some of those involve tradeoffs: For instance, the specific type of instrument flying training I undertook was a night VFR rating. Single-engine night VFR comes with its own risks, which I can judge with my eyes open, and mitigate appropriately (the decision to acquire the autopilot came part-way through the training as a mitigator for the risk of perceptual illusions). Time will tell if my tradeoffs are good ones. Will I have an accident? No idea, I really hope not. But if I do, I know there’s a 100% chance that it won’t be due to low flying, or loss of control in cloud, or mishandling of a crosswind on landing, or inadvertent spinning. I’ve made specific decisions to exclude myself from those. Maybe I’ll be surprised by something else, but the residual risk in aviation in small planes looks significantly safer than the baseline once those classes of accident are eliminated from the stats. Hope that’s useful to someone. - mark
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