Condor Corner
Glider flight simulation–for safety’s sake.
The fourth of this series to appear in the New RC Soaring Digest. The original version of this article first appeared in the May 2022 issue of Soaring magazine. — Ed.
Each year the Soaring Safety Foundation (see Resources below for link) publishes a Safety Report citing both fatal and non-fatal glider-related accidents and comparing the year’s accident rates with longer term trends. To focus attention on the issues bringing our sport and its participants to the greatest grief, accidents are categorized by phase of flight. The report also offers valuable analysis and recommendations designed to help reduce the number of glider-related accidents, ideally to zero.
As I read through the most recent report — Nov. 1, 2019 through Oct. 31, 2020 — I was again reminded of the potential that flight simulation has for contributing to flight safety.
Experience
Based on nearly 50 years of flying light aircraft and my 15 years as a flight instructor, I have concluded that the safest pilots are those with the most experience; not just as a function of total time, but more importantly related to the breadth, depth, relevance and recency of that experience. Consider the following excerpt (shown below in italics) from the most recent SSF Safety Report. Note: the bold text in the excerpt is my edit.
To continue reducing all accidents and to eliminate all fatal accidents, ALL glider pilots must realize that this is not a problem with individual pilots. These accidents are typically not caused by pilots ignoring the rules or taking incredible risks. Instead, we must recognize that pilots are responding to situations in the manner in which they were trained. These Human-Factors errors are symptoms of a deeper systemic problem with our training environment …
I would like to suggest the “deeper systemic problem” is that aircraft-based flight training is inherently inadequate. Pilots cannot be expected to properly respond to situations they have not realistically and repeatedly experienced, and by extension learned to avoid. In other words, “what would you do if” is a poor substitute for actual situational experience, and a single actual in-flight experience (for example, one pre-solo PT3 at 300 ft AGL) is a poor substitute for a multitude of related, varied experiences. Either because it would be unsafe or because it is too time-consuming and/or expensive, aircraft-based flight training fails to adequately expose rating candidates to the situations we know routinely result in accidents and, in so doing, not only leaves them without the flight skills needed to mitigate these situations, but more importantly leaves them without the motivation and judgement skills needed to avoid these situations in the first place.
For example, one of the accidents cited in the SSF report resulted from a stall/spin in the landing pattern, likely the result of being so low and slow as to render physically impossible a landing on the intended runway. Another accident involved the glider kiting on the towplane. Clearly these situations cannot be safely replicated on an actual training flight. It is however possible to safely place pilots in these situations using flight simulation; allowing them to realistically ‘experience’ the tragedy, futility, and inevitable consequences of trying to stretch their glide to the runway or losing site of the towplane. Flight simulation allows for the development and testing of mitigation tactics (for example, an abbreviated approach or safe off-airport landing), and more importantly affords the opportunity to make and evaluate the in-flight decisions that paint us into these corners in the first place.
The advantage of simulation-based flight training is that all glider pilots can be realistically, repeatedly and safely exposed to these and other high-risk situations, gain invaluable experience dealing with them and more importantly develop the judgement and decision-making skills to avoid them altogether. I am reminded of Frank Paynter’s Condor Corner article entitled Learning from Your Own Fatal Mistakes (link in Resources) where he related the results of mistakes made in simulation that later prevented him from making the same mistakes on actual flights.
Lack of Total, Relevant and Recent Experience
The chart below, taken from the 2019–2020 SSF Safety Report, shows that 78% of all glider-related accidents over the past five years have occurred in the Launch and Landing phases of flight, with the majority occurring during landing and approximately half of those off-airport.
From the perspective of total, relevant and recent experience, this should come as no surprise. Launch and Landing are the phases of flight in which nearly all glider pilots have the least experience. Consider that, even on a typical 20-minute training flight, a combined time of only three minutes — 15% of the flight — will be spent taking off and landing. Expand that thought to the typical three hour cross-country flight and the experience gained in these critical phases of flight shrinks to less than 4%. Consider then the amount of actual experience most glider pilots have landing off-airport and you begin to see my point. Why would we expect glider pilots to be any good at taking off and landing?
Glider flight simulation provides the opportunity to dramatically expand the breadth and depth of our physical and, more importantly, our mental flight experience. One hour on Condor can provide more total experience, and a greater variety of launch, launch failure and landing experiences than most certificated glider pilots will experience in a year, and it’s a great way to maintain those critical skills in the off-season, thereby helping to mitigate the ‘Spring Stupids’.
SSF Trustee Actions and Recommendations
The SSF’s Annual Safety Report concludes with a list of Trustee Actions and Recommendations including Scenario-based Training, Stall Recognition Proficiency and Goal-Oriented Landing Approach, all of which could be dramatically enhanced using simulation. I’ll have to save these topics for future articles.
Next Month
The next article in this series is subtitled Kato and the Ghosts. I hope that intriguing monicker will bring you back to learn that, despite best laid plans, unexpected things can still happen.
For now, then, thanks for reading! Please leave any questions you have in the Responses section — you get there by clicking the little 💬 below.
©2022, 2023 Scott Manley
Resources
- Soaring Safety Foundation — “the Training and Safety arm of the Soaring Society of America (SSA). Our mission is to provide instructors and pilots with the tools needed to teach/learn both the stick & rudder skills and…”
- Learning from Your Own Fatal Mistakes — “What kind of a title is this … Obviously if the mistake was fatal, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity for learning afterwards, at least not on this mortal coil…”
- Condor Corner in the New RC Soaring Digest. — The complete set of articles as they have appeared in this publication.
- Simulation-based Glider Flight Education, the author’s website. — “to provide you with the information and resources you need to self-manage the flight training and aeronautical knowledge development required to qualify for a Private Pilot Certificate with a Glider Category…”
- Condor — “simulates the complete gliding experience on your computer. With it you can learn to fly gliders and progress up to a high level of competition skill. The core of the simulator is the state of the art physics model and advanced weather model aimed at soaring flight.”
- Soaring Magazine, the official publication of the Soaring Society of America. — “each issue brings you the latest developments on safety issues, delightful accounts of individual soaring accomplishments, a sharing of ideas and experiences, tips from the great soaring pilots of our times, and…”
Read the next article in this issue, return to the previous article in this issue or go to the table of contents. A PDF version of this article, or the entire issue, is available upon request.
