When an onlooker says "aren't those things dangerous?" We should
really think about our response. Are they? Although the article below is
about hang gliding, it is eminently applicable to us.
Every activity has inherent risk. And unfortunately, a small amount is
beyond our control—it's just plain luck. A safe driver can be blindsided by a
red-light running truck. A careful biker can have a wheel fall off due to manufacturing
defects. A paramotor pilot can be surprised by unexpectedly nasty air.
Of course we can do a lot to minimize risk, but not always.
Our sport, operating as it does in the invisible, sometimes turbulent
ocean of air, carries an element of chance. Paramotor pilots have the
luxury of choosing to fly in the most benign conditions which is most of
why paramotoring seems to be safer than free flying. For most pilots, though,
it will only be a matter of time before they accept some weather
condition that's not the perfectly smooth, benign forecast, slice of
stillness they hope for. Such is our reality.
We've talked about experienced pilots and margins and so forth but sometimes, even withOUT pushing the
margins, there's unavoidable risk. The article below (Here
is the Wills Wing Original) presents an interesting angle on safety and
such risk.
Mike Meier is a California Wills Wing (hang
glider maker) designer, test pilot and originator of USHPA's
Safe Pilot award. This article first appeared in USHPA's magazine and is
presented here with permission.
Why Can't We Get a Handle on This Safety Thing
by Mike Meier, Photos by Jeff Goin
If I were to ask you to characterize the view that
the "uninformed public" has of hang gliding, what might you say? You
might say that they think of hang gliding as a "death sport," or, at
the very least, an "unreasonably unsafe activity."
You might say that they think hang glider pilots
are "thrill seekers who recklessly disregard the inherent risks in
what they do." You might say that they are under the mistaken
impression that hang gliders are fragile, unstable flying
contraptions blown about by the winds, only partially and
inadequately under the control of the occupant.
If confronted by a spectator with this attitude,
how might you respond? You might say that once upon a time, in the
very early days of the sport, it was true that gliders were
dangerous, and pilots behaved in an unsafe manner. You might point
out that in recent years, however, the quality of the equipment, the
quality of training, and the level of maturity of the pilots have
all improved immeasurably. You might point to the fine aerodynamic
qualities of today's hang gliders, the rigorous certification
programs in place for gliders, instructors and pilots, and you might
give examples of the respectable occupations of many hang glider
pilots--doctors, lawyers, computer programmers. You might make the
claim that hang gilding today is one of the safer forms of aviation,
and is no more risky than many other action-oriented sports.
Later on, you might laugh about the ignorant
attitude of the "wuffo." Or, you might wonder, "Why is it, after all
these years, that the public still doesn't understand? Why can't we
educate them about what hang gliding is really like, and how safe
and reasonable it really is?"
So now let me ask you another question. What if
they're right? What if they're right and we're wrong? And what if I
can prove it to you?
Let's take a look. First of all, you have to admit
that year after year we continue to kill ourselves at a pretty
depressing rate. Anyone who has been around this sport for very long
has probably lost at least one friend or acquaintance to a fatal
hang gliding accident. Most of us who have been around for more than
20 years have lost more than we care to think about. It's true that
we have seemingly made some improvement in the overall numbers in
the last 25 years. Between 1974 and 1979 we averaged 31 fatalities
per year. Since 1982 we've averaged about 10 per year. In the last
six or eight years, we may have dropped that to seven per year. On
the other hand, what has happened to the denominator in that
equation? In 1978 there were 16 U.S. manufacturers viable enough to
send teams to the manufacturer's competition in Telluride. Today we
don't even have a manufacturer's competition. My guess is that the
fatality rate hasn't changed much, and almost certainly hasn't
improved in the last 10 years. I'd guess it's about one per thousand
per year, which is what I guessed it was 10 years ago.
So the question is why? The equipment gets better
and more high tech every year, we know more about teaching than
ever, we've got parachutes, rockets to deploy them, full-face Kevlar
helmets, wheels, and FM radios for emergency rescue. We're all about
20 years older, and commensurably wiser and more conservative. How
come we're not safer?
I've been asking myself variations of this
question for as long as I can remember. Three years ago I had an
accident, and in thinking about that accident I thought that maybe I
had stumbled onto some little insight into the answer. I'll share it
with you.
Here's the story. (If you don't like reading
"there I was" stories, or other people's confessional accident
reports, skip this part. I won't be offended.) We were doing some
production test-flying at Marshall Peak in San Bernardino,
California. For those of you who haven't flown there, Marshall is a
rounded knob in the middle of a 2,200-foot-tall ridge in the
foothills along the northern border of the east end of the Los
Angeles basin. It's a very reliable flying site--probably flyable
300 days per year and soarable on most of them.
It was July, in the middle of the day, but the
conditions were not particularly strong. We were landing on top,
which we do whenever conditions are not too rowdy, because it vastly
enhances efficiency. I was flying a Spectrum 165, and setting up my
approach. I've logged about 100 top-landings per year at Marshall
for each of the last 15 years. Even so, I know for a fact that at
the time I was not complacent. I know because I have a clear memory
of what I was thinking as I set up my approach. In two weeks I was
due to leave on a three-week family vacation abroad, and I was
thinking, "You damn well better not get yourself hurt before your
trip or your wife is going to kill you." At the same time, I wasn't
anxious. I was flying a Spectrum and the conditions were only
moderate. I'd made lots of successful landings on more difficult
gliders in more challenging conditions. I hadn't had an unsuccessful
landing attempt in longer than I could remember. I was relaxed, yet
focused. My intent was simply to fly a perfect approach. Such intent
is always a good idea when top-landing at Marshall; the landing is
challenging, and a sloppy approach can quickly get you into trouble.
I knew exactly where I wanted to be at every point in the approach,
position, heading, altitude and airspeed. I executed the approach
exactly as I wanted to.
You top-land at Marshall half crosswind, gliding
up the backside of the hill. You come in hot, because the gradient
can be extreme, and there's often some degree of turbulence. The
time interval from 40 mph dive, through round-out, to flare is very
short. I was halfway through this interval, past the point where one
is normally rocked by whatever turbulence is present, when both my
left wing and the nose dropped suddenly and severely. I went
immediately to full-opposite roll control, and managed to get the
wings and nose just level when the basetube hit. Having turned 90
degrees, I was traveling mostly downwind, at a ground speed of
probably 30 mph. The right downtube collapsed immediately, and the
right side of my face and body hit the ground hard.
Very briefly I thought I might die. For a slightly
longer time I thought about paralysis. Within a minute, I knew I was
mostly okay. In the end, I got away with a slightly sprained ankle
and a moderate case of whiplash. I had three weeks to think about
the accident while I bounced around the rutted dirt roads of East
Africa trying in vain to keep my head balanced directly over my
spine to moderate the pain.
The thing was, I never considered at the time of
the landing that I was anywhere near "pushing the envelope." I've
done dozens of landings at Marshall during which I did feel that
way. All during the previous two summers I had been top-landing
RamAirs at Marshall in the middle of the day in much stronger
conditions. I had never had a crash. Thinking about it, I couldn't
even remember the last time I had broken a downtube. I tried in vain
to think of a clue I had missed that this was going to be a
dangerous landing.
Finally, I was left with only one conclusion. What
happened to me was nothing more or less than exactly what the
potential result was, during any of the times I had landed under
similar or more challenging circumstances. It was a dangerous
landing because of what could have (and did) happen. The corollary,
of course, is that the other landings I had done on more challenging
gliders, in more challenging conditions were also dangerous. (In
fact, they were more dangerous.) And they were so in spite of the
fact that no bad results ensued in any of those landings.
And suddenly I felt like I was beginning to
understand something that I hadn't previously understood.
You see, here's how I think it works. The
overriding determinant of pilot safety in hang gilding is the
quality of pilot decision making. Skill level, experience, quality
of equipment--all of those things are not determinants. What those
things do is determine one's upper limits. More skill gives you a
higher limit, as does more experience or better equipment. But
safety is not a function of how high your limits are, but rather of
how well you stay within those limits. And that is determined by one
thing: the quality of the decisions you make.
How good do those decisions have to be? Simply
put, they have to be just about perfect. Consider the types of
decisions you have to make when you fly. Do I fly today? Do I start
my launch run at this time, in this cycle? Do I have room to turn
back at the hill in this thermal? Can I continue to follow this
thermal back as the wind increases and still make it back over the
ridge? Each time you face such a decision there is a level of
uncertainty about how the conditions will unfold. If you make the
"go" decision when you're 99% sure you can make it, you'll be wrong
on average once every 100 decisions. At 99.9%, you'll still be wrong
once every thousand decisions. You probably make 50 important
decisions per hour of airtime, so the thousand-decision point comes
every 20 hours, or about once or twice a year for the average pilot.
So, to be safe you have to operate at more than
99.9% certainty. But in reality, 99.9% is virtually impossible to
distinguish from 100%, so really, for all intents and purposes, you
have to be 100% sure to be safe.
And now I think we can begin to understand the
problem. Let's first consider this: We all have a strong incentive
to make the "go" decision. The "go" decision means I launch now,
relieve my impatience to get into the air and avoid the annoyance of
the pilots waiting behind me, instead of waiting for the next cycle
because the wind is a little cross and the glider doesn't feel quite
balanced. It means I turn back in this thermal and climb out above
launch and stay up, instead of making the conservative choice and
risk sinking below the top and maybe losing it all the way to the LZ.
It means I choose to fly today, even though conditions are beyond my
previous experience, rather than face listening to the "there I was"
stories of my friends in the LZ at the end of the day, knowing that
I could have flown but didn't, and knowing that they did and were
rewarded with enjoyable soaring flights.
So the incentive is there to choose "go." The only
thing we have to counter this incentive is a healthy respect for the
possible dangers of failure and our ability to evaluate our
prospects for success. And here's where we get caught by a
mathematical trap.
Let's say I'm making my decisions at the 99%
level, and so are all my friends. Out of every 100 decisions, 99 do
not result in any negative consequence. Even if they're bad
decisions, nothing bad happens. Since nothing bad happens, I think
they're good decisions. And this applies not just to my decisions,
but to my friends' decisions as well, which I observe. They must be
good decisions; they worked out didn't they? The next natural
consequence of this is that I lower my decision threshold a little.
Now I'm making decisions at the 98% level, and still they're working
out. The longer this goes on, the more I'm being reinforced for
making bad decisions, and the more likely I am to make them.
Eventually, the statistics catch up with me, and
my descending threshold collides with the increasing number of
opportunities I've created through bad decisions. Something goes
wrong. I blow a launch or a landing, or get blown over the back, or
hit the hill on the downwind side of a thermal. If I'm lucky it's a
$50 downtube or a $200 leading edge. If I'm unlucky, I'm dead.
If we can agree at this point that making 100%
correct decisions is the only safe way to fly, it then becomes
interesting to consider, as an aside, what the sport of hang gliding
would look like if we all operated this way. Pilots would choose to
fly in milder, safer weather conditions. They would operate much
more comfortably within their skill and experience limitations. They
would choose to fly more docile, more stable, easier-to-fly gliders.
Landings would be gentle, and under control. Hang glider
manufacturers would sell two downtubes and one keel for every glider
they build (the ones that come on the glider) instead of three or
four replacement sets like they do now. There would be far, far
fewer accidents. (As it is now, there are about 200 per year
reported to USHGA.) There wouldn't be any fatalities, except maybe
for one every couple of years if a pilot happened to die of a heart
attack while flying (it's happened once so far that I can remember).
Since this isn't anything like what the sport of
hang gliding does look like, we might conclude that hang gliding, as
it is presently practiced, is an unreasonably unsafe activity
practiced by people who lack a proper and reasonable regard for
their personal safety. In other words, we might conclude that the
"uninformed public" has been right about hang gliding all along.
If you don't like that conclusion, I'm pretty sure
you're not going to like any of the coming ones either. But let's
first ask this question: If we wanted to address this problem of bad
decisions being reinforced because they look like good decisions,
how would we do it? The answer is, we need to become more critically
analytical of all of our flying decisions, both before and after the
fact. We need to find a way to identify those bad decisions that
didn't result in any bad result.
Let's take an example. You're thermaling at your
local site on a somewhat windy day. The thermals weaken with
altitude, and the wind grows stronger. You need to make sure you can
always glide back to the front of the ridge after drifting back with
a thermal. You make a decision ahead of time that you will always
get back to the ridge above some minimum altitude above the ridge
top, say 800 feet. You monitor your drift, and the glide angle back
to the ridge, and leave the thermal when you think you need to in
order to make your goal. If you come back in at 1,000' AGL, you made
a good decision. If you come back in a 400, you made a bad decision.
The bad decision didn't cost you, because you built in a good
margin, but it's important that you recognize it as a bad decision.
Without having gone through both the before and after analyses of
the decision, (setting the 800-foot limit, observing the 400-foot
result), you would never be aware of the existence of a bad
decision, or the need to improve your decision-making process.
This was one of the main ideas behind the USHGA
Safe Pilot Award. The idea wasn't to say that if you never crashed
hard enough to need a doctor, you were a safe pilot. The idea was to
get pilots thinking about the quality of their decisions. Not just,
"Did I get hurt on that flight?" but, "Could I have gotten hurt?"
During the first couple of years of the Safe Pilot Award program I
got a few calls and letters from pilots who would tell me about an
incident they'd had, and ask for my opinion as to whether it should
be cause for them to re-start their count of consecutive safe
flights. I would give them my opinion, but always pointed out that
in the end it didn't matter. The important thing was that they were
actively thinking about how dangerous the incident had really
been--that is, what the actual quality of their decision making was.
Looking back on it now, I would say that the
criterion for a safe flight (any flight which didn't involve an
injury indicating the need for treatment by a licensed medical
professional) was too lenient. Today I would say it shouldn't count
as a safe flight if, for example, you broke a downtube. A few years
ago (or maybe it was 10 or 12--when you get to be my age it's hard
to tell) we had a short--lived controversy over "dangerous bars."
The idea was that manufacturers were making dangerous control bars,
because when smaller pilots with smaller bones crashed, their bones
broke before the downtubes did. (Today, most of the complaints I
hear are from the other side, pilots who would rather have stronger
downtubes even if their bones break before the downtubes, because
they're tired of buying $65 downtubes, which they're doing with some
regularity.) I have a different suggestion for both of these
problems. Why don't we just stop crashing?
Of course, I know why. The first reason is, we
don't even recognize it as crashing. I continually hear from pilots
who say they broke a downtube "on landing." (I even hear from pilots
who tell me--with a straight face, I swear--that they broke a keel
or a leading edge "on landing.") The second reason is, we don't
think it's possible to fly without breaking downtubes from time to
time. I mean, after all, sometimes you're coming in to land and the
wind switches, or that thermal breaks off, or you're trying to
squeak it into that small field, and you just can't help flaring
with a wing down, sticking the leading edge, groundlooping, slamming
the nose (WHAAAAACK!) and breaking a downtube.
We regularly observe our fellow pilots breaking
downtubes, which also reinforces our perception that this is
"normal." I'm going to go out on a limb here. I'm going to say that
if you've broken more than one downtube in the last five years of
flying, you're doing something seriously and fundamentally wrong.
Either you're flying too hot a glider for your skills, or you're
flying in too challenging conditions, or at too difficult a flying
site.
Now let's ask one more thing. If hang glider
pilots stopped dying, and if hang glider landing areas stopped
resounding with the sound of WHAAAAAACK every second or third
landing (in other words, if hang gliding started looking like fun
instead of both terrifying and deadly), do you think maybe the
public's perception of the sport might change? (Not do you think
more of them would want to do it? In truth, no, they probably still
wouldn't.) But do you think maybe they'd stop thinking we were crazy
for doing it?
Maybe they would. And maybe they'd be right.
