More Fatalities in second half of year

[Guest High Plains Drifter]

Just reading the RAAus CEO report from Lee Ungermann (RAAus mag, July 2008) and came across this interesting stastistic...

 

Quote -

 

"Traditionaly as our year unfolds we distinctly see four times as many fatal accidents occur in the second half of the year as the first half. Whilst this is curious to say the least, I write to make all of you aware of your flying practices so that we may prevent any loss of life"...

 

Four times as many fatalities in the second half !!! ...Thats amazing.

 

I wonder whats different ?

 

- High Westerly winds and accociated turbulence perhaps ?

 

- Pilots taking a winter flying break and loosing skills a problem ?

 

- Spring making us older pilots feel young and invicible again ? ...but without the quick thinking reactions of youth.

 

Be interested to know what others think...

 

 

[Yenn]

Statistics is my guess, so all we have to do is avoid becoming one.

 

 

[Spriteah]

I suspected that it could well be:

 

1. Skills a little rusty after winter

 

2. Plane not maintained to acceptable standard

 

3. Poor flash in old fuel creating less power

 

So with that in mind. Do some taxi work. Practice circuits. Take an instructor with you.

 

Give the plane an excellent thorough going over.

 

Change out or at least top up fuel and expect PPP (Piss Poor Performance). If its a 2 stroke I'd service carby (oil build up in bowl and jets).

 

Jim

 

 

[facthunter]

Statistics.

 

I think we had a very good first half year accident-wise. It's easy to come off a low base and get that kind of result. All accidents are regretful. Don't interpret my statement as trivialising it, But we are talking statistics. Nev...

 

 

[farri]

Accidents.

 

Can we realy change anyones destiny???.

 

Frank.

 

 

[facthunter]

Are you a fatalist?

 

Farri I am not. I've saved my skin, by being carefull to double-check things that I'm not sure of enough times to think it's a good idea. When you said " a miss is as good as a mile" outcomes-wise it might be, but situationally there is a breakdown of standards so the "miss" is a product of luck, so we are gambling in a sense, and you should only do that, if you can afford to lose.. Nev..

 

 

[Guest brentc]

It can't be anything more than coincidence. Whilst it may be historically true, I find that comment somewhat distasteful and irrelevant.

 

Financial year or Calendar year?

 

 

[Guest High Plains Drifter]

It can't be anything more than coincidence. Whilst it may be historically true, I find that comment somewhat distasteful and irrelevant.

.............thats reference tooooooooo.. Nevs comment ? (facthunter)

 

 

[Guest High Plains Drifter]

I think we had a very good first half year accident-wise. It's easy to come off a low base and get that kind of result. All accidents are regretful. Don't interpret my statement as trivialising it, But we are talking statistics. Nev...

Nev, Looks like we need to find out how many years of 'statistics' Lee Ungermann was baseing his observation on.

 

 

[Spriteah]

Wow,

 

It's just statistics!!!! No it's not. It's an incident leading to fatality.

 

Can we control it. Yes we can. I work in a petroleum where we used to have 600 'accidents' a year. We have recently achieved over 2 million man hours worked without an 'accident'.

 

It is a mind set. Not fate. If someone at my work place says accidents will happen I want the off the site immediately. They are dangerous. Most 'accidents' can be determined. That means they are not acts of god but more so errors that could and can be avioded.

 

Don't ever except it as a accident. If someone has to land in a hurry ask why. What could have been done to prevent the incident? Has maintence been correctly conducted? By a competent person? What failed and why?

 

Most of us will now a pilot that has run out of fuel. How can that occur? Should they be pilots? How did we fail to train them? Lots of questions. Don't ever say it happens, that will lead to fatalities........

 

Yours in safe flying. If we continue to have deaths in the sport we will be taken over by a government body. You will be banned from maintaining your craft. It will cost a lot more to fly.

 

jim

 

 

[farri]

Farri I am not. I've saved my skin, by being carefull to double-check things that I'm not sure of enough times to think it's a good idea. When you said " a miss is as good as a mile" outcomes-wise it might be, but situationally there is a breakdown of standards so the "miss" is a product of luck, so we are gambling in a sense, and you should only do that, if you can afford to lose.. Nev..

facthunter,

 

I understand that clearly,we must try and learn from others mistakes so that we don`t repeat them however I still ask the question,"Can we realy change someones destiny"?

 

As an instructor I thought about this a lot and I have seen many of the top guns of recreational aviation, killed,some were instructors also,did they all not know what they were doing or was it simply their fate and can we realy stop it?

 

Frank.

 

Ps. Luck is just a word,What does it realy mean?.

 

 

[Guest High Plains Drifter]

...or was it simply their fate and can we realy stop it?

.........sorta like that Irwin fella ?

 

 

[facthunter]

Luck.

 

I don't know farri, but a lot of random things occurr out there and they don't affect everybody the same, nor could they.

 

Luck- I suppose in a game of russian roulette, pulling the trigger and not having a bullet in that chamber. I would never play at russian roulette. Gotta be the ultimate mug's game. I'd rather look like a wimp and be alive than be a tough corpse with a newly ventilated skull.

 

HPD. Funny that ,I have actually looked down and saw that I was swimming over a stingray of enormous size and I swear I swam without moving anything for the next 15 feet . I was terrified. Irwin was not afraid of animals, like me. Maybe I was lucky and he wasn't..Nev...

 

 

[Guest High Plains Drifter]

Luck- I suppose in a game of russian roulette, pulling the trigger and not having a bullet in that chamber. I would never play at russian roulette. Gotta be the ultimate mug's game. I'd rather look like a wimp and be alive than be a tough corpse with a newly ventilated skull. Nev...

Hmmm... in certain situations, to certain people, its like having $200,000 down on the table with a six shooter with one bullet. Do you take the high reward way with a one in six chance of looseing, ....or do you go home to moma ?

 

Lifes a funny thing - the highest rewards come from the highest risk.

 

 

[Bernie]

Hi Mum I'm home

 

 

[Guest High Plains Drifter]

You added a bit to your post Nev -

 

HPD. Funny that ,I have actually looked down and saw that I was swimming over a stingray of enormous size and I swear I swam without moving anything for the next 15 feet . I was terrified. Irwin was not afraid of animals, like me. Maybe I was lucky and he wasn't..Nev...

I think Irwin may have become a bit complacent, or He just was'nt aware of the dangers stingrays can present. Perhaps after dealing with crocodiles and sharks, the harmless looking rays were a bit ho-hum.

 

I guess the 'safety' in any endevour is in knowing all the 'details' the best you can. Make your own risk assessement and if you find the risk/reward ratio is unacceptable, then I guess best to stay home.

 

....I do note though Nev, that you knew stingrays to be dangerous, yet you were still in the water - obviously an acceptable risk/return ratio :thumb_up:

 

 

[Guest airsick]

Maybe one of the reasons that we crash more in the latter half of the year is because we fly more? Throughout spring and summer the weather is more conducive to flying so we do it more. Although technically speaking there may indeed be more accidents during this period it may still be a misleading statistic.

 

Assume we had 50 accidents in the first half of the year and 100 in the second. On the surface it appears the second half of the year is worse, much worse. But if we had 50 takeoffs and landings in the first half and 1000 in the second the story changes somewhat. This equates to 1 accident per takeoff and landing (or should I say per takeoff and crash?) and 1 accident per 10 takeoff and landing cycles respectively. So which half looks better now?

 

A better way to look at it might be do consider how many accidents we have per takeoff/landing cycle, or per flown mile or some other metric. I think RAA collects information on takeoffs and landings so this may not be a hard one to use.

 

If Lee has fallen into this trap (the misuse of a statistic) then he should be careful. Of course he may have fallen into this trap on purpose in order to get us to be more careful which isn't such a bad thing. In this respect a statistical white lie isn't so bad.

 

 

[Guest pelorus32]

It can't be anything more than coincidence. Whilst it may be historically true, I find that comment somewhat distasteful and irrelevant.Financial year or Calendar year?

Brent,

 

what is your evidence for saying that it can't be anything more than a coincidence and what by the way is distasteful or irrelevant about it?

 

More generally, there have been several comments in this thread about statistics and it's only statistics.

 

I can tell you that it's never statistics. Each one of those fatal accidents is anything but a statistic. What it is is the unfortunate and unnecessary death of a living breathing person. That's not statistics that's tragic human cost.

 

If, by pointing out an apparent pattern, Lee induces members to take greater care then that is a positive thing. Many patterns like this are hard to explain. It doesn't mean that the pattern doesn't exist. More people die in the month after their birthday than in any other month. How do you explain that? Is there much you can do about that? Probably not.

 

When you fly however you can do lots to affect the outcome. If we didn't believe that we'd never fly. So if there is an apparent pattern then Lee has an obligation to point it out. It is up to each of us individually to think about whether that will change what we do when we fly.

 

Farri, I'm afraid your question is much to metaphysical for a bloke like me. I'll have to meditate on the answer to that

 

Kind regards

 

Mike

 

 

[farri]

https://www.recreationalflying.com/xf2/uploads/emoticons/040_nerd.gif.a6a4f823734c8b20ed33654968aaa347.gif[/img]

 

Kind regards

 

Mike

 

Pelorus32,

 

Metaphysical is exactly what I wanted the question to be because I wanted to show that I could outline any number of things that must be done to fly as safe as possible however not everyone is going to follow them and therefore the accidents will keep happening.

 

It is a tragedy that anyone should die,regardles of the time of year and I don`t have a problem with exploring that area but I think we should be looking more at what is causing the accidents than the time of year.

 

Frank.

 

 

[Yenn]

If there are more accidents in the second half of the year, can anyne break down those statistics geographically. In Qld I would suggest that the winter is the best time for flying with less wind and less rain, so we should all be more current in the second half of the year. What we really need is to have a good hard look at the figures and see if there is anything we can learn from them.

 

I would be interested in seeing dates and locations of accidents, as well as aircraft types and pilot experience set out for the last few years. Maybe if they were published in an acceptable format someone could learn something from them.

 

 

[Guest brentc]

I just wrote a huge reply to that Mike and I lost it. Stupid virgin broadband. In summary I agree that they are not statistics. I'd be VERY surprised if anyone could find a link regarding the second half of the year and if they did it would be one hell of a stretch unless more hours are flown in the latter part of the year.

 

 

[Guest Flyer40]

Scientifically speaking, there is no such thing a luck. Good or bad, luck is an artificial concept that allows a simplistic explaination, often when there's a reluctance to face up to the true causes of an outcome. There's a very good motivational poster that you may have seen around which puts this into perspective. It quotes Gary Player as saying, "it's funny, the more I practice, the luckier I get......"

 

Further to Spriteah's excellent post, the same concept of creating your own luck applies to manageing risk. We can actively control the variables that affect the chance of something happening, so that it's no longer left to chance. This can be done to a high level of reliability without too much difficulty. It's a prospective approach to creating your own future.

 

Of course there are practical limits on how tightly we can control things and there will always be incidents with causes that fall outside what was reasonably foreseeable. But long before that practical limit is achieved, the risk management process typically stops when a perceived level of tolerability is reached. Tolerability in terms of both the accidents that occur and the efforts taken to prevent them. The enduring problem is that the later drives the former and it needs to be the other way around if you're seeking good safety performance.

 

The accident pyramid shows us that for every fatal accident there are 10 serious accidents, 600 minor accidents and 6000 near misses. (depending on who's numbers you use but you get the idea)

 

Managing risk is not rocket science, anyone who has survived puberty knows how to manage risks.

 

So why do we keep seeing the same accidents over and over? Why aren't we learning from the thousands of near misses that enable us to foresee where the next accident is coming from and prevent it before it happens?

 

If you've ever found yourself hoping that nothing goes wrong, then you know what it feels like when you haven't managed your risks. If you're prepared to tolerate that, don't be surprised when something does go wrong.

 

 

[motzartmerv]

Yep, i reckon airsick got it..we fly more in those months..Is simple matter of numbers in the air.. Like shark attacks.. they mainly occur in summer months, why?? well cause thats when dudes are in the water..

 

A little of topic, but, rays are fantastic animals to dive with.. If you give them some space they will happily go about there business..Infact, near where i live at huskisson harbour there are a couple of resident bull rays, these things are huge, wider then a tinny. The kids hold fish heads in the water and these rays come up and take them from there hands..

 

Knowing steve and his antics, he probably tried to give one a hug and a kiss.. Poor dude, My family were devistated the day he died..

 

 

[farri]

Safety.

 

This is partly off topic also, however,I think it is relative.

 

I`ve been diving all my life and I know that to get hit in the chest with a stingray barb you have to be within striking distance of it`s tail and that distance is pretty close.

 

If the safety margin in the flights that we do is too small then chances are that we will cop it,also.

 

Frank.

 

 

[Kaz]

You can turn numbers into statistics and get any answer you like. Unless there is some context, like the others guys have said, location, cause of accident (human/machine), flying hours, weather conditions etc then a statistic really means whatever the person creating it wants it to mean. Believe me, I've done it.

 

The definition of Luck (c/- dictionay.com)

 

the force that seems to operate for good or ill in a person's life, as in shaping circumstances, events, or opportunities

 

Winning Lotto isn't luck, however it is a statistical possibility according to the people at Tatts!