On 11/9/05, Peter Creswick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > You may be on the right track there Michael. It may well be that under > reporting is the real bottom line issue here. > Perhaps glider pilots in general are (for legal, pride and / or peer > ridicule reasons) unwilling to be forthcoming with incident reports in the > first place, unless something actually gets bent, broken, or hurt, such that > it can't be hidden. We have no idea (since the GFA will not tell us) how > many incident / accident reports they get each year. It may be, that there > are so few reports, that, that in itself, is the big secret. If so, that is > a real worry.
I feel that this whole "people won't report because of pride/ridicule" argument is pretty speculative. My personal experience is that in an environment which encourages and accepts such reports people DO tell about their mistakes even if nobody is going to know about them (e.g. errors in judgment, or forgetting something while flying alone at high altitude). The leadership decided that nobody is going to get silly "punishments" for silly mistakes but just basically pass on the information. A lot of this is the mindset prevailing in the clubs. It doesn't mean that problems are not handled just because they were reportted - if the report shows that the someone needs some refreshing on procedures or how to fly a particular type of glider then they WILL get this help, but most people will take it as a help in re-training rather than a punishment. The body of members that I have experience with gets this message and don't act like a bunch of high-school teenagers looking to degrade anyone around them for their own immidiate ego kick but appreciate the reports. The odd ones out are the ones who DON'T pay attention to safety discussions (I can't remember anyone in that group who answers this criteria). There might be a slight problem of chicken-and-egg here of people seeing an example of someone reporting incidents without being "punished" and ridiculed. Maybe the leadership can do some work to get people into the right mindset, but that's up to them to decide if and how they are going to aproach this whole business of incidents reporting. I think I personally will feel safer in a "translucent" environment where people are mature enough to come forward with their mistakes for the benefit of the group instead of sweeping things under the rug and pretending that "everything is fine" until the hidden "almost accidents" graph turns into an "accidents graph". (think about bugs in Open Source Software vs. Proprietary Software, if that means anything to you). --P _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list Aus-soaring@lists.internode.on.net To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
