There seems to be a Gorilla sitting on the couch that no one seems to want to discuss.....
Stein alluded to my safety presentation in the Stall Spin thread and given that the recent past has been a little deadly, I thought I would accommodate his request and share one of the premises of the presentation that I give to Warbird audiences... We have a horrible safety record in the Warbird community and several years ago I was the Stand-Eval Chair at the CAF when we had a rash of accidents that threatened our insurability.. We had to do something and it fell in my lap. We had a safety standdown. Started annual safety training for all CAF pilots and I ended up taking it on the road. It applies equally to the RV world....
Before anybody gets wrapped up in the details of some recent fatal accidents, lets think about how we, as pilots, react to accidents. Let me be clear, this is not a thread about the details of the recent accidents.
Wilbur Wright wrote a letter to his father in 1900 that said a deliberately accepted risk was safer than ignoring or denying the risk. So lets talk about the Gorilla.... RV flying is dangerous. The bull**** we tell our spouses that the most dangerous part of flying is the drive to the airport is, just that, bull****.... John and Martha King call this "The Big Lie." If we can't be honest about this basic fact, then we are doomed to continue killing our friends or ourselves.
Flying, the way most RV pilots do it is dangerous. Formation is dangerous, Acro is dangerous, spontaneous low level flying is dangerous. You can tell yourself that you have it all figured out, and the way you do it, is not dangerous..... Hogwash... It is dangerous... in 2008 there were 10 fatal accidents in RV's... Does anybody think that is an acceptable number? For that number to change, we can't wish it down. Behavior must change... Some will want to look at the accident reports, but the problem is how we do that.
We read accident reports and look for the one thing that we don't do that the subject pilot did, then we feel vindicated and say, "There, see, that guy did XXX, I don't do that, therefore, I don't have a problem." Instead we should read accident reports and say, "That guy was smart, sane, and as good or better pilot than I am and he got caught, why couldn't that happen to me?"
Nobody ever got out of bed and said, "Today is a good day to kill myself in an airplane." Read accident reports looking for the links in the chain that you have done, or the mistakes you have made, instead of looking for the link that you perceive to let you off the hook.....
What this is about is behavior modification. Only if we are honest with ourselves about the risks inherent in our flying will we change behavior. That is hard to do.... My wife has been working on me to put the seat down for over 20 years and my compliance is still fairly low by her standards....
Once we honestly acknowledge the risks, then we can develop strategies to mitigate them.
That goes like this:
Identify the risk.
Rate the risk.
Rate the reward.
If the risk out weighs the reward stop.
If it doesn't, brainstorm ways to reduce the risk.
If we are entirely honest with ourselves about the risk versus reward, then like Wilbur Wright, we can accept the risk for what it is, or change the behavior.... Only then will the statistics change.
Tailwinds,
Doug Rozendaal
Stein alluded to my safety presentation in the Stall Spin thread and given that the recent past has been a little deadly, I thought I would accommodate his request and share one of the premises of the presentation that I give to Warbird audiences... We have a horrible safety record in the Warbird community and several years ago I was the Stand-Eval Chair at the CAF when we had a rash of accidents that threatened our insurability.. We had to do something and it fell in my lap. We had a safety standdown. Started annual safety training for all CAF pilots and I ended up taking it on the road. It applies equally to the RV world....
Before anybody gets wrapped up in the details of some recent fatal accidents, lets think about how we, as pilots, react to accidents. Let me be clear, this is not a thread about the details of the recent accidents.
Wilbur Wright wrote a letter to his father in 1900 that said a deliberately accepted risk was safer than ignoring or denying the risk. So lets talk about the Gorilla.... RV flying is dangerous. The bull**** we tell our spouses that the most dangerous part of flying is the drive to the airport is, just that, bull****.... John and Martha King call this "The Big Lie." If we can't be honest about this basic fact, then we are doomed to continue killing our friends or ourselves.
Flying, the way most RV pilots do it is dangerous. Formation is dangerous, Acro is dangerous, spontaneous low level flying is dangerous. You can tell yourself that you have it all figured out, and the way you do it, is not dangerous..... Hogwash... It is dangerous... in 2008 there were 10 fatal accidents in RV's... Does anybody think that is an acceptable number? For that number to change, we can't wish it down. Behavior must change... Some will want to look at the accident reports, but the problem is how we do that.
We read accident reports and look for the one thing that we don't do that the subject pilot did, then we feel vindicated and say, "There, see, that guy did XXX, I don't do that, therefore, I don't have a problem." Instead we should read accident reports and say, "That guy was smart, sane, and as good or better pilot than I am and he got caught, why couldn't that happen to me?"
Nobody ever got out of bed and said, "Today is a good day to kill myself in an airplane." Read accident reports looking for the links in the chain that you have done, or the mistakes you have made, instead of looking for the link that you perceive to let you off the hook.....
What this is about is behavior modification. Only if we are honest with ourselves about the risks inherent in our flying will we change behavior. That is hard to do.... My wife has been working on me to put the seat down for over 20 years and my compliance is still fairly low by her standards....
Once we honestly acknowledge the risks, then we can develop strategies to mitigate them.
That goes like this:
Identify the risk.
Rate the risk.
Rate the reward.
If the risk out weighs the reward stop.
If it doesn't, brainstorm ways to reduce the risk.
If we are entirely honest with ourselves about the risk versus reward, then like Wilbur Wright, we can accept the risk for what it is, or change the behavior.... Only then will the statistics change.
Tailwinds,
Doug Rozendaal
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