IX. Safety

The final trend I will comment on is safety. Contests are getting slowly safer. If you watch the spectacular “Sunship Game” from 1970, you’ll not only be struck by how much everyone smokes, and how little they wear in the sun, you’ll be struck by the amazing amount of glider carnage, and the casual attitude towards it.

In many ways, contests are extremely safe. I do not know of a single recorded PTT (premature termination of tow) accident at a contest, though they are rampant in regular flying. There has been exactly one, though tragic, assembly failure, and that on an informal practice day. In fact, contests are a great place to learn how to fly in a much safer and more disciplined way.

Much of this comes from a collective effort. Over time we have developed a lot of safety practices and knowledge. Dehydration and pee systems may seem small, but one or two accidents per year add up. Tow procedures and the careful dance around the airport all keep the monster at bay.

Moreover, contests have evolved mechanisms to pass on useful safety knowledge. Old-timers wince at the  daily safety talk – another US innovation – but how else are new pilots to learn vital lessons including thermal etiquette, landouts, and most of all that even the top pilots make far different and more conservative decisions in the air than you might think from a discussion around the bar? A lot of person-to-person mentoring goes on at contests as well. (I have Hank Nixon to thank for pointing out a couple of stupid things I was doing in my “youth.”) We have a good safety system, that refines and passes on important institutional knowledge.

Tasking has evolved to a much greater concern for safety. Better weather forecasting, the ability to change tasks on the grid and in the air, and the MAT and TAT means that sending pilots into a hopeless thunderstorm is very rare. CDs think much harder about poor terrain or weak ridge lift.

1. Rules and safety

And rules. Once you realize that rules consider measurement and incentives, there is an obvious safety implication: if we remove temptations–places in which pilots can earn hundreds of points by accepting a physical risk — we  can lower accident rate. We have to balance this effort with “measurement” of course; such changes are only really attractive if they do not reduce the “measurement” function, i.e. spoil the race.

A recent example occurred in a crash at the World Championships I attended in Hungary.  There were really good fields for the last few km before the airport, then a road, a fence and the airport. A pilot returned with low energy. Floating over several gliders in the field short of the airport who didn’t quite make it, he still thought he could do it. Skimming in ground effect, he had just enough energy to pull up over the fence….except there was a truck going down the road. The truck driver was severely injured in the resulting crash.

Now, why did this pilot ignore the perfectly good field with gliders in it, and instead try to pull up from ground effect to just skim a barbed wire fence (to say nothing of the road)? Well, obviously, the rules gave him about 400 points if he cleared the fence by 1 mm.

This is not an isolated accident. It’s been going on for 50 years. Year after year, around the world, where this possibility exists, there is regular carnage in the fields (or lack of fields) in the last few km before the finish, on the finish fence, or resulting from arriving at the airport with 10 feet, 40 knots, and no ideas.

What should we do? We can deplore it, as we have for 50 years. “What a bozo.” “A good pilot like me would never do that.” Alas, this answer is of little help to the truck driver, and little comfort to wives at funerals. And even very safe pilots who once proclaimed this sort of view become more circumspect after they get caught pulling up over trees on final, or giving in to other temptations. I speak from experience. I work on these things because I know I am not immune to temptation.

We can spend another 50 years hectoring pilots not to do it.  We should, and will. But this is hardly new wisdom, and I’m sure this pilot – like every other pilot who has done something dumb in the heat of a contest – could have given a great lecture on just this danger.  It makes us feel good, but it has not proven effective in reducing the accident rate.

How do we actually reduce the accident rate? The answer is obvious. Don’t give 400 points 1mm above the fence. Move the “finish” point upwards.  It makes no difference to the quality of the race, since the change is the same for everyone. The US is slowly moving to this system. The IGC is belatedly waking up, and slowly moving the finish out and up. They still are not assessing a sufficient penalty. If you blow a high finish on world rules, you get a warning the first time and 25 points the second time. Measurement vs. incentives: what do you do if you’re low? Answer: 400 points and a warning beats 400 less points and no warning. The wild flying and poor accident record at the Grand Prix has led to a 100 meter hard deck there; no points for a meter below. This works. (If I seem a bit rough on this issue, it is not without reason; I wrote a Soaring magazine article describing the problem and its solution 10 years ago; seeing in person exactly the crash I had warned against so long ago, and seeing the same refusal to accept the obvious answer, is a little discouraging.)

All of this is horrendously controversial, and I wouldn’t even bring it up if I did not have a captive audience who is too polite to come out with the usual tar and feathers when I bring this issue up. I’ve heard screams of protest, been called the “safety Nazi”, accused of “social engineering” and worse.

This is an interesting response. It’s interestingly common in all sports. Bike racers fought helmets for years. In the face of strong clinical evidence about what asphalt does to the human brain. They claimed “helmets will worsen safety, because they obstruct your vision.” Race car drivers fought safety rules. The baseball players union fought viciously to stop testing for steroids.

This kind of change is not an attempt to “legistlate safety. “ That’s silly. The idea is simply to “remove temptation, where it costs little (measurement) to do so.”  Nobody is trying to “remove the pilot’s responsibility for safety.” Safety always is and always will be the pilot’s responsibility, and decisions up to him or her.

But we decide what actions we want to reward with contest points. That is our responsibility. If we think the skill of skimming in ground effect and judging whether you’ll be 1 mm above the barbed wire or 1mm below the barbed wire is not the skill we want to use to select our champions, then it is entirely our job, and our duty, to change that.

And this is nothing new. This is a history talk, so I can point out we’ve been doing it forever. This is the extension of a longstanding trend, not some wild new idea. Here are just a few examples.

In the 1970s, you could land out, return, assemble and try again. The result was a 90 mph retrieve, 5 minute assembly, 10 second preflight. Pilots didn’t do a very good job of exercising their responsibility. The rules changed; now once you land out you’re done for the day.

In the 1970s, the pilot was free to do whatever he wanted with water ballast. Some pilots chose to ignore manufacturer limits and fill the wings with huge bags. This one is interesting because so few points, really, are at stake, for a substantial risk. At any rate, pilots not doing a very good job of making their decisions led to weight rules and weighing, despite the substantial costs and hassle involved.

Rolling finish procedures are a great example, here because of what pilots were willing to do for surprisingly small number of points. Here is a true story, only slightly embellished (actually two true stories merged into one). We’re at Hobbs, with a main runway and a second, very rough runway that extends about a mile away from the main one.

Spratt: “Now, rolling finishes get 5 extra minutes of time, you’re scored when you stop, and must be on the main runway.”

Pilot X: “Charlie, why 5 minutes, and  why can’t we roll on the other runway?”

Spratt: “Because the last time I let you do that, you, Pilot X, deliberately landed out there to save the two minutes to the finish gate”

Pilot X:  “OK, Charlie, but why can’t I be scored when I touch down, not when I stop”

Spratt: “Because when we let you do that, you, Pilot X, were smacking the ground at 120 knots on the end of the runway and then orbiting for a landing in order to save the minute of flying to the actual line”

And so it goes. For as long as we’ve been racing, we’ve put in rules that remove temptations for pilots to do something stupid. This year we tweaked the finish gate again: Some pilots thought it was a dandy idea to do a sharp pull up and enter the finish cylinder from the bottom, even though there could be lots of other gliders around. Seeing this great display of pilot decision-making, we changed the finish cylinder rule to remove that temptation.

2. The future

Well, so much for the past. Rules changes that remove temptations, with little consequence to the quality of the race, have reduced the accident rate.  Are there further possibilities?

About some things, alas, not much. The first half of this decade sported a number of crashes in which pilots flew into mountains. Even I can’t think of a way to reduce this temptation, at least without damaging the “measurement” function unnecessarily. (Unfortunately, the response here is mostly not to run races in mountains, though mountain flying is some of the most rewarding in soaring.)

Until recently, there wasn’t much rules could do about midairs. Yes, we could set tasks like TATs, start procedures, and devaluation formulas to minimize the attraction of gaggling, but there wasn’t much we could do about aggressive thermaling. Flight recorders are beginning to change this. At the worlds, Brian Spreckley brought along traces of reported near-misses and publicly chastised the offending pilots.

Traces can be used to penalize all sorts of unsafe behavior; or more properly, to remove the temptation to engage in unsafe behavior in the quest for points. To be effective, however, this strategy must be handled properly and objectively. At least 10 pilots did something stupid in my view (i.e. cut me off or nearly ran into me), and I’ll admit to one or two screwups now and again. We could fill up the protest meeting if complaining becomes a competitive strategy. Perhaps a computer can be programmed to find all the near-misses objectively.

The vast majority of contest crashes remain on off-field landings. I look at all the NTSB reports, and I have looked at a lot of traces. Practically no contest off field landing follows the book: examine fields from over 1000’, commit by about 600’, fly a proper pattern. Straight in at 53 knots is much more common.  The NTSB crash reports almost uniformly record the pilot circling at very low altitude.

These crashes could be addressed with a “hard deck.”  At an easy MSL altitude corresponding to roughly 600’, you are scored as if you landed out.  This could be implemented tomorrow by simply making airspace below certain MSL altitudes forbidden, and including those in the sua files.  The altitude is over the  valley, the ridge sticks out.

Again, we are not removing any pilot’s decision-making responsibility. We are doing exactly the opposite. We are simply saying at about 600 feet, “look, you need to make a good safety decision. Maybe you can thermal out. Maybe you should give up and land. Whatever you do, you’re in a tight situation; be a good pilot in command and make that good decision. And by the way, we don’t want to bias that decision one way or another. So points are off the table, no matter what you do. See you when you get back.”

“What about my 200’ save?”  the anguished pilot cries. Well, I answer, what about the guys who didn’t make it? The gun clicked 5 times in a row. Does that really mean Russian roulette is safe?  Yes, I’m sorry, the 200 foot save will have to go, along with bouncing over the barbed wire fence out of ground effect.

I brought this idea up to a SRA meeting once. The vote was 39-1. I mentioned the bike helmet story. The vote was still 39-1. I’d like to get a vote of the wives someday. (Once I tried the “only bozos crash, I’m a good pilot” theory on my wife. She answered “the heck with that. I know you, when points are on the line you’re  the bozo.” )

By the way, I am told the USAF top gun school does this. They found in simulated combat a lot of pilots were fighting all the way down to about -100’ AGL. So they put in a “hard deck.” They simulate a landout at 10,000 in the rules. Apparently they’re not manly enough to let pilots make their own decisions.

It’s possible. It’s simple. We’ll do it someday. Probably after a rash of crashes.

Of course, we can also continue the current practice of structuring tasks to reduce landouts, to keep pilots over decent terrain when weather gets weak, or to keep them off the ridges in very marginal ridge lift.

A related controversy continues. Should the CD have the explicit right to call off the day if the weather gets out of control? In many other sports the CD-equivalent is in charge of the safety of the race and does this, for example in sailing. Our CDs actually do have the authority to do it, but few know the technicalities of the rules to dream up that fact on the spot, and many falsely believe there is a rule against it.

Our tradition – not rule – is that once the start gate is open, the race is on for good, no matter if a tornado or squall line appears. We expect pilots to voluntarily give up when weather turns dangerous. But we give out points to those who do not and survive. Unsurprisingly, the history of decision-making under these incentives is not particularly good. Until a few years ago, the CD really did not know what was going on, but radar, satellites, and better radio communication open up the possibility.

This isn’t easy, as none of these decisions are easy. Some worry about legal responsibilities – if the CD does not accurately diagnose the thunderstorm and some bozo crashes, will he get sued? I worry about the opposite legal responsibility – if there is a tornado and the CD does not call it off, won’t the lawyers sue us anyway?

This is a hard question – I think the answer is yes, but I respect all the difficulties that lead others to disagree. However, let’s be clear it is not an issue about “removing pilot authority” or “making decisions for him.” All we are doing is thinking about when we give out contest points. We are debating whether the CD should be able to say “Listen up, pilots. We have a tornado out there. Use your pilot decision making to do the safest thing possible. But I’m not giving out contest points based on what you do now. It might be safe to come back, it might not. You make that decision. Forget about points, I want you totally focused on making your own decisions.”

And of course, as I emphasized above, gaggling and leeching are only a function of rules, in particular task type, start procedures, and devaluation formulas. If we dislike them for safety reasons, as well as if we want to change the character of the race to focus more on soaring skill and less on tactics, that’s an area of potential improvement.

Can we stop all accidents? No. Can we remove all temptations? No.  Are rules changes the biggest route to lower accident rates? No. But if we remove from glider racing the remaining 30% of the situations in which you can earn several hundred points from taking risks unacceptable in regular flying, will we reduce the accident rate? Yes. As we have done many times in the past.

Why not? Some say “gliding is a dangerous sport, accept it.” This is true, but it does not mean we need to make it artificially more dangerous than it already is.

Most of all, the answer is, participation. One accepts danger in “extreme sports” or in spectator sports. One does not attract widespread participation with danger. When you tell people you soar, what do they always ask? “Isn’t that dangerous?” (Or “how nice, I’d never let my husband do that.”) When you tell a regular pilot you fly contests, what do they often say? “Sounds like fun, but I don’t want to break my glider.” If we could honestly refute that impression, we’d have a lot more participants.

A recent Sailplane and Gliding interviewed Hans Werner Grosse, and asked why he gave up flying competitions. He answered, “I still hate gaggles, tactical start-line games, and low approaches in close company with other pilots who have not been to enough funerals.”

All that is rules, and all that can be changed. And it is changing, slowly.

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