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Comment by sails | Hacker News Reader

I keep coming back to this article, for me the standout insight is that skill etc does not increase safety, it just determines your "upper limit". What actually determines your safety is the decision making that prevents you getting too close to the upper limit.

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

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I've also read this article a number of times in the past - I used to fly sailplanes, and did a paragliding course at some point. Somewhat regularly I feel a strong urge to pick up paragliding more seriously - I think flying is one of the most beautiful things in the world.

However, pretty much every time that happens I force myself to research the safety situation (especially given that I have a daughter now) and I can't justify the risk to myself.

This part pretty much captures it:

> And that, is determined by one thing; the quality of the decisions you make. And how good do those decisions have to be? Simply put, they have to be just about perfect.

Also - "perfect" in this case means you have to be _very_ conservative, especially as a beginner, or as someone who doesn't fly regularly. Which, in turn, is going to result in less skill maintenance.

Turbulence being invisible + the power of air + the limits of these unpowered flying devices in terms of control and cushioning adds up to a lot of risk if this is an activity you do over a number of years.

Similar situation, and I know from my early kitesurfing days where you are stuck waiting for the weather, and then pushing sketchy conditions because you've only got limited time etc. This but with seemingly higher consequences have kept me away from flying for now. Really love the idea of getting into it.

I even flew RC slope planes for a while instead, which really illustrated how easily you get on the wrong side of the weather, with much lower consequences!

My understanding is that's how a lot of small aircraft crashes happen. "Well, the weather's worse than I'd like to fly in... but if we wait until tomorrow we'll miss our reservations (or whatever) and everything will be delayed... eh, it's probably fine, let's go ahead, doesn't seem that bad."

"Plan continuation bias", or as the (powered) aviation community colloquially refers to it, "get-there-itis". It's definitely a common factor in commercial aviation incidents too (though more often 'should we land here or divert' than 'should we take off').

I've never been hang gliding, but I get the sense from the article there there's another factor at play here that may be less applicable to powered pilots that should have a good understanding of the risks from their required training and pre-flight planning. An important element in the essay seems to be that hang glider pilots don't have a good understanding of the risks - due to the way crashes are perceived in the community - and that is a prerequisite for doing a competent risk analysis and formulating a safe plan in the first place. They're blind to the risks they're taking, and consider the sport safe, even when they are frequently crashing.

The teaching point of the essay to me, is more that if something can be 'safely' accomplished 99% of the time, but 1% of the time it is deadly, it is extremely unsafe, but due to confirmation bias from 'always' being successful, won't be seen as risky, and in those situations we humans need to be very deliberate about our decision making.

Community perception is an interesting point, and it reminds me of a book, Black Box Thinking [1], which I wouldn't outright recommend, but it does an interesting job of comparing safety culture across aviation and medicine.

> it is imperative that we create the systems and the culture ... to help educators learn from errors rather than feel stigmatized by them

Aviation has a very strong culture of publishing and scrutinising near misses and mistakes, and that culture leading to positive feedback loops that improve safety.

Medicine (historically, and the book's argument) chalks up mistakes to "one of those things".

Applying this to hang gliding, I managed to find quite a few careful analysis examples of accidents on forums. Obviously less scrutinised than aviation, but probably fair to say generally has a culture of safety consciousness, but in the context of an inherently deadly sport. Fair to say aviation, medicine and hang gliding all are varyingly deadly.

[1] https://vpaonline.org/wp-content/uploads/principal_resources...

Well, you gotta have that skill in the first place to make good decisions. Without skill and experience in place. If you don't have skill in place to analyze situation properly the only good option is absolutely the safest one (which might be not to try in the first place)

If you don't have the skills, then the good decisions are either to not participate or to gain them.

This, of course, raises the question of whether the latter is a safe option. This can be approached statistically - are the incident rates higher in training than among skilled pilots? Only if they are do we have to move on to the second question, which is how to safely acquire the skills needed to have the option to be safe.

I think about a parallel in juggling - It's not the catches, it's the throws. To a bystander, it's very impressive that you can catch all the balls; but if your throws are bad, it's impossible to catch them - the pattern gets away from you.

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