Why can’t we get a handle on this safety thing? (1998)

I think a useful insight, not just for dangerous sports but anything with high risk of failure and large decision volume.

> The overriding determinant of pilot safety in hang gliding is the quality of pilot decision making. Skill level, experience, quality of equipment; all 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. And

This narrative is so compelling because there is a certain underlying truth to it. You don't really appreciate how effective your tires are until you reach that boundary where they start to slide out. You need to jump a few times before you get a feeling for how to jump. You can minimize your risk in other ways, but you can't eliminate it entirely.

But on the whole, it feels like there is a culture within mountain biking (though certainly not amongst all riders) that you should always be pushing your boundaries to improve and that if you are eking out thinks out at 99% or whatever like the guy talks about in the article, you're doing things right.

As the saying goes, “There are no bold and old pilots.” If flying and hang gliding teaches you anything, it is to take the right decisions within the framework of safety you have experience with. It’s a bit like knowing how to ride a bicycle, but you want to do a wheelie when it rains – not the right decision.

Circa 2022, the safety and community policing is strong enough to weed out non-safe pilots. I know pilots are as old as 80 years old and have been flying for 40+ years without incidents.

More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pir3FAB4e3Q

The primary determinant of failure is bad decision making, not skill, experience or equipment. In the absence of feedback, bad decisions look like good ones, because we get away with them, and that reinforces risk taking.

The author suggests that reflective practice is a key to improvement but most of us don't think over our actions - we just constantly "get away with" the outcomes.

One thing made me laugh;

   "...respectable occupations of many hang glider pilots;
   doctors, lawyers, computer programmers."

A lot of people, when something bad happens, like breaking whatever a downtube is, or even a bone, chalk it up to "Life experience" and think it's an acceptable or necessary thing.

They say stuff like "Exceed your limits so you know your capabilities".

It's similar to the "Drop out of college for a 3 month backpacking trip, learn about life not math".

Wheras some people would instead say "I don't need to know my limits. I know where they aren't, and that's enough to avoid going near them".

Trouble is, those people don't hang glide in the first place!

I believe this gets you a nice safety bonus. At least you don't continue to shrink that error margin by telling yourself "so far so good". But you're still nowhere in the clear. Not making any mistakes is not humanly possible. And chance plays a role in dangerous sports no matter your skill or safety consciousness. So in the end you can only accept the risk or not.

Bonus related joke: A man slips and falls off a tall building. As he passes every floor he tells himself "so far so good".

> That sentence, “The most dangerous part of gliding is the trip to the glider field” is the dumbest, most ignorant saying that has found a home in our sport.

> The only thing they were doing up there was waiting for the start gate to open 1000 meters lower. And when it did open, they all dove down with air brakes open at 110 knots. The fact that the standard and 15 meter pilots squeezed the last 50 meters of height out of the thermal can only mean that something was wrong with their thinking.

> Everybody has to develop a safety strategy for himself. The simplest is to eliminate the risks that are completely unnecessary.

We tend to look at overall "risk of dying doing a sport" and fail to maintain awareness to identify these specific moments.

For example, our family wakesurfs on Lake Tahoe. My wife considers boating and wakesurfing pretty safe. However, in June the water temp is 53 degrees F. If our boat sinks 3 miles offshore and nobody sees it, life jackets will not save anyone. The boat sinking that fast is unlikely, but it is possible. I consider that an unacceptable unmitigated risk, and ask her to stay near shore when she drives.. yet she never does, and when i scold her she thinks im nagging and annoying.

While i'm not a pilot, i've been up with private pilots, taken hang gliding lessons, done tandem skydives, ride motorcycles, dirt bikes, ski a ton, backcountry ski..

..i don't consider any of these activities to be "safe" or "unsafe" overall.. i consider moments of low safety margin to be dangerous and to be understood, treated with extra care and mitigated or avoided as much as possible.

Maybe it is neither in just a function of increased urbanization or monoculture.

That said, it seems like there is a general decline in serious hobbyists in a lot of fields/ activities

If a pilot makes 50 safety-critical decisions over the course of a single flight, at a 99% success rate, I believe the actual chance of completing the flight without incident is given by 0.99^50, or ~60%. So, 2 out of 5 flights would result in an incident.

Of course, the reverse is true, if you know your actual rate of safety-critical incidents to be 1% of your flights, you can calculate how good your decision-making has been by 0.99^(1/50), or said another way: you've made the "safe" decision ~99.97% of the time.

"Gann compiles a grim list: commercial pilots who perished during his flying career. They number more than 400."

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/ernest-gann-fate-of-the-hunte...

If breaking a downtube meant an automatic $1,000 fine and a year's suspension from flying that might help; but ultimately it's the honest prediction-then-self-assessment of decisions described in the article that's necessary.