Patrick wrote:
A busy motorway on the ground does not seem reasonable
Partrick thanks for making a reasonably laid out post. This quote unfortunately is wildly inaccurate. The A27 is an A-road not a motorway and that junction has traffic lights which can stop all lanes.
I agree that there needs to be numbers to make any really solid argument. Which may be extremely difficult to get a reasonable grasp on considering the lack of occurences compared to timescales for rules and number of displays.
While I don’t have the numbers to hand I think it would be very much more likely for you to go out driving in your car and be killed / injured by another driver through no fault of your own compared to a display aircraft coming out of the sky.
Patrick wrote:
Yah I know. I hate those headlines. “10 Germans killed in airplane crash” – what difference does it make where the poor souls came from?
Just to back my statement (although I can agree that perception is different accross the cultures) how many of us noticed this? It happend two days before Shoreham tragedy but it wasn’t even mentioned at this site and 7 people were killed.
Patrick wrote:
Next, we’d need to compare it to a similar list of.. what.. GA accidents globally in the same time-frame?
Emir wrote:
how many of us noticed this? It happend two days before Shoreham tragedy but it wasn’t even mentioned at this site and 7 people were killed.
It was actually featured in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 2nd largest quality newspaper of Germany. The article would have been very different if it had happened in Germany though so you are very right about your point.
Risk perception is very much skewed by our imagination. An airplane crashing down on us moves us emotionally. Just like a shark. We had a shark attack 10km from where I operate my business, one German killed (very different from one “person”) killed. Luckily the news cycle didn’t turn this into a big thing but in the past it has had a huge impact on tourism. Every five years one person is killed by a shark in the Red Sea. Every year 20 or so tourists get killed there in road accidents. And yet this one shark makes thousands of people cancel their vacation or stay out of the water. Being killed by a shark has a much lower chance than winning the lottery jackpot even if you swim in the water every day. Crazy.
Off_Field wrote:
The A27 is an A-road not a motorway and that junction has traffic lights which can stop all lanes.
Sorry about that and thanks for the correction. In Germany, the “A” denomination is reserved for Autobahn/motorways and my mind tricked me there. Been a few days since I drove in the UK.
Achim,
slightly OT:
actually, every country has a “glide clear rule”. That’s because ICAO has it and AFAIK, all countries adopt it. Even Germany does (even though it is often overlooked):
Luftverkehrs-Ordnung (LuftVO)
§ 6 Sicherheitsmindesthöhe, Mindesthöhe bei Überlandflügen nach Sichtflugregeln
(1) Die Sicherheitsmindesthöhe darf nur unterschritten werden, soweit es bei Start und Landung notwendig ist. Sicherheitsmindesthöhe ist die Höhe, bei der weder eine unnötige Lärmbelästigung im Sinne des § 1 Abs. 2 noch im Falle einer Notlandung eine unnötige Gefährdung von Personen und Sachen zu befürchten ist.
So, even though it obviously doesn’t contain any factual numbers, the effect of that rule (in combination with the others) is that one could be legally required to fly much higher than the 500/1000 feet rule says.
Class A Public Transport aircraft have their performance charts, and system redundancy, factored or raised to achieve a better (i.e. less than) than 1:1,000,000 risk of an accident. In practice major western airlines, and in particular US Part 121 operations operate at much better safety standards based on experience.
In terms of exposure (time or miles), this may be the safest human activity.
GA runs on average at around 1:20,000 for accident rate, 1 to 2 per 100,000 hours for fatality. The lighter aircraft in the GA fleet have a relatively lower proportion of accidents that result in injuries.
Arguably the general public might expect air show display routines to lie in a risk zone that is better than GA.
And here’s the fallout (NB, this link goes to a dynamically updated page at The Telegraph):
“Following the accident we immediately began an urgent review and have, today, announced a series of immediate restrictions and changes to UK civil air displays.“The CAA has announced the following:
As a precaution, on Saturday 22 August we took steps to ensure no further flights were made by Hawker Hunter aircraft – this temporary restriction remains in place. Flying displays over land by vintage jet aircraft will be significantly restricted until further notice. They will be limited to flypasts, which means ‘high energy’ aerobatics will not be permitted. The CAA will conduct additional risk assessments on all forthcoming civil air displays to establish if additional measures should be introduced. We commenced a full review of civil air display safety yesterday and held an initial meeting this morning.“The safety standards that must be met by all major civil air displays in the UK are among the very highest in the world and are regularly reviewed. All air display arrangements, including the pilots and aircraft, must meet rigorous safety requirements. Individual display pilots are only granted approval following a thorough test of their abilities.
“The CAA will continue to offer every assistance to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch as it seeks to establish the cause of the accident. The CAA will also act promptly in response to any emerging indications from the AAIB’s investigation.
“Further details will be provided in the coming days and we will continue to work with the industry to ensure the most appropriate action is taken as a result of this review.”
Flyer59 wrote:
That’s really trying to manipulate what I said.
You cannot deny that once you pull the chute on that SR22, there is no way of knowing where it will land ;-) Maybe on the Autobahn… Then we will get a ban on those chutes and the general public will demand that the pilots control the plane all the way to the ground.
Patrick wrote:
Of course, Urs, that is simply not true. The operator of the Love Parade decided a day after the tragedy that there will be no future Love Parades. Certainly, other events have seen an increased focus on emergency exits etc. since then, but where are you pulling the “no street parades any more” from?
Yes I remember that it was the organizers who pulled the plug, but it is the same attitude. We have one regrettable incident and instead of LEARNING from it, the towel is thrown rather than think ok, what can we do to make it safe. And to take such decisions a DAY after an event does not seem very professional either: You can impose immediate measures temporarily to prevent a re-occurrence but to one day after an event coming to a FINAL conclusion is the very definition of a knee-jerk reaction.
It was also the organizers who decided to abaondon Tannkosh, but the reason why they did had a lot to do with the massive regulative they could no longer afford to guarantee. The end result is the same.
Patrick wrote:
Your mistake in this argument, IMHO, was to assume anyone who argues against you here in this discussion belongs to that lot and is chasing “vision zero”. That attitude is not really encouraging objective “risk assessment and management”, either. You’re also very emotional about this, albeit in the direction of saving society from falling into risk-free and colorless lethargy.
You may well be right that I tend to get allergic reactions to this kind of thing these days. The reason for that being that I can see every day how our freedom is continuously and methodically eradicated and each and every chance used to further restrict and limit those freedoms. All of aviation suffers greatly from this and not only aviation. The underlying reason being that society is no longer willing to accept any perceived or real risk in any aspect of life.
We have in the last decade or so seen a steady decline in aviation for that simple reason. The moment that one isolated accident happens we see knee jerk reactions which do nothing else than follow the hyena cries of the press and the “outraged public” to stop, ban, eradicate this perceived risks, even though in the real assessment those risks do not change dramatically after one isolated accident.
The reason for that is manyfold. In aviation it has to do with a self-protective attitude of the regulators as well as legal concerns where aviation incidents and accidents have been more and more exposed to a legal battle about “who is guilty, who must be punished” rather than “what went wrong, what can we learn”. You will read that this is a M A J O R concern in all aviation safety circles and we certainly have had plenty of discussions about this within Avherald and other safety organisations I have participated in the past and present. This effect has had a dramatic consequence on all of aviation but with General Aviation in particular.
If I see that an accident during an air display in Switzerland on Sunday which did unfortunately result in the death of one pilot and some collateral damage on the ground but no injuries or deaths, the press and some politicians here are howling and shouting for a “vision zero” ban of all air shows, the closure of that airfield and the crucifixion of those who “allowed this show to happen”. The same day that unfortunate pilot came to grief, 6 alpinists dies and several car crashes happened, yet nobody (so far) has suggested closing up the Alps and banning cars. Well, actually, some of the same politicians who scream against airshows would love to but are clever enough not to try… they do limit their spite against aviation where they know that their opponents are civilized people who will not fight back too hard…
Maybe you will understand that I get slightly annoyed if I see the same demands issued by insiders in aviation including respectable journalists and other people who really should know better than to continue cutting off the branches on which we all are sitting.
As it stands, it does look like the flight of the accident Hunter may well have been one of the very last of that type in the UK. Equally, it remains to be seen how this horrible accident will impact the last season of the last flying Vulcan, it may well cut it short. And one more thing is pretty sure: A ban or severe restriction of airshows in Britain will lead to the same effect it has had elsewhere: Aviation will loose a lot of popular support as a consequence. Which of course is very much in the interest of some of the politicians who loose no time exploiting these unfortunate events.
As Patrick said, risk can be measured by likelihood times impact. If we consider ‘impact’ at the fatal level, then we need to look at historic death frequency to guide us on likelihood. We also need to look at the relevance of the risk, as Mooney_Driver and achimha suggested.
I believe this is the first airshow accident since 1952 to kill anybody outside the audience.
The casualty toll (mostly car occupants?) may rise but is estimated at 11 as I write this.
Which is tragic.
But we need to put it in context, according to this:
Between 1951 and 2006 a total of 309,144 people were killed and 17.6 million were injured in accidents on British roads.
The accident rate has fallen in recent years, (but probably the air show risk has too).
So every time a car driver sets out they accept risks some 30,000 times greater than the air show risk. Both of being killed, and of killing somebody else. (Less than half the fatalities are inside a car). Focussing on the air show risk, while ignoring the far greater risk they pose to themselves and others, is not a tenable position.
IMHO policy makers should not waste time on 0.0033 % of the risk but rather remain focussed on the actual problem, the one the journalists don’t write about so much.
