My mission is to inspire and teach the art of soaring.
Over the winter, I have developed several new resources for ridge pilots. I have updated The Ridge Map, developed a slideshow of landmarks and fields along the Blairstown ridge (from Millbrook to Hawk Mountain), and made a CUP file landout database from Vermont down to Virginia.
I have updated a tab on the site as “Other Ridge Resources” where you could learn more about this project.
Clemens Ciepek wrote a thought provoking piece that computed the relative risk of dying in soaring in relation to other activities. He pointed out that statistically, glider flying is twice as dangerous as motorcycling. And the risk of dying while soaring in the next 1000 hours is approximately two percent, ouch.
Observing the responses and reactions, many people pushed back at the statistics. Sure, a lot of this reaction can be explained through cognitive dissonance. Yet the statistics speak for themselves; soaring is a high risk activity.
However, we should examine the risk concept a bit further. We have considerable control over the risk we accept. This is not a cop-out, but rather a factual statement. The reason we crash is due to human factors and poor decision-making, not things outside of our control.
However, we must also accept that overcoming our human foibles is difficult. It’s kind of like trying to beat the stock market; sure it might be possible, but everyone else is trying to do the same thing. The same psychological processes that prevent smart people from doing better than the market are the same ones that get us killed.
All that given, it’s still worth examining where the risk is hiding in soaring.
Almost all gliding accidents occur during takeoff or landing. The remainder includes mid-airs, health-related episodes, structural failures, etc. Most of us can exclude the remainder from the risk equation. Therefore, almost all of the risk is in the first and last five minutes of the flight; below 1000ft AGL. Otherwise, unless we hit a bird or an airplane, the risk level above 1000ft is nearly nil.
This suggests that our overall risk level should be low if we are totally professional when we do our takeoffs and landings. We can do this by meticulously performing checklists and strictly maintaining our margins in decision-making, airspeed and coordination.
The opposite is also true. If we rush through the pre-flight, forget to do our pre-takeoff checklist and an issue arises on tow, our risk level would be very high. When we thermal below 1000ft AGL, neglect choosing a suitable landing option for too long and fail to commit to a safe approach, our risk level would be extremely high. At a minimum, should we indulge in entering this high risk territory, we should acknowledge it and minimize the risk through our choices. But it’s best to avoid it.
For competitive pilots, there is the additional risk of a midair with another glider. It’s undoubtedly true that the likelihood of a midair in competitions is considerably greater than in casual flying. That said, incidents and accidents in competitions are overwhelmingly due to poor landout judgment. This is entirely in the domain of pilot decision-making.
Then there’s ridge/mountain flying. Here the risk level is probably an order of magnitude greater than in thermal soaring. This is due to the challenges of taking off and landing in strong winds, maneuvering in close proximity to the terrain in gusty conditions, and the poor landing options in the vicinity of mountains. There are many ways to mitigate these risks, but this requires a tremendous amount of experience and effort. We have to study the weather, terrain and learn the fields and their approaches. We have to train to handle challenging conditions. And even if we do everything right, we still cannot contain all the risk. To use Clemens’ analysis, ridge flying is probably as dangerous as climbing the Tetons. And interestingly, in the past I have used mountain climbing as an analogy for the risk level associated with ridge soaring.
That said, there are mountain climbers out there who successfully scale mountains their whole lives. They often do this by being cognizant of the risks and consistently mitigating them. They do this through good preparation, training and maintaining their margins.
My point is not to detract from the statistics. It is to give us tools to think about so that we can control our risk level. And since there’s a lot we can do, we can greatly minimize the risk of dying doing what we love.
There are three ways to crash. The first involves factors well outside our control, such as a rope break at 150 ft with nowhere to land straight ahead. We tend to disproportionately worry about these kinds of events and yet they account for a very small proportion of accidents or fatalities. The second involves deficiencies in basic airmanship. This includes situations like confusing the gear handle for the spoiler handle and fruitlessly cycling the handle up and down while screaming down the whole length of the runway. Lack of experience or recency tend to be the significant factors. However, complacency or an unfamiliarity with a new aircraft systems could still bite experienced pilots.
The third kind of accident involves critical errors in judgment or decision-making. This is where many of us get into serious trouble. Accidents related to “when to stop soaring and start landing” fall into this category. Also relevant is when to abandon a task or determine that the conditions are too challenging.
Matt Wright’s and Dale Kramer’s accidents come to mind. Both cases were similar in that other experienced pilots flew in the same conditions and chose to abandon their respective flights. Both pilots were driven, pursued difficult weather and then drove themselves in situations that were unrecoverable.
Why is it so hard to avoid this trap?
The underlying issue is that glider flying is unforgiving of overstepping safety margins. And yet the margins are not clearly demarcated. The glider flies until it doesn’t and departs into a spin. We can clear a tree line over the last field before the airport, or over the top of a ridge, until we can’t. The outcomes are either we are unscathed or end up plastering ourselves into the ground.
Sure, we sometimes scare ourselves. We may realize that we “cut it too close” on a flight. But tragically, even this experience will not always help us.
Worse yet, as we expand our margins, we can slowly erode our way into the territory where we are at serious risk. Ideally we scare ourselves before we go too far, but not everyone is so lucky.
And more importantly, as our margins become thinner, the more we enter into the gray area where we might lose control of the situation. There are limits to our control; even the best pilot can only keep his airspeed within certain bounds, suppose +- 1 knot. If his aircraft is exactly at the edge of stall, he would have a 50 percent chance of failing. And extending this logic to other situations, just how low can we reliably clear a treeline? Or how low can we thermal near a field? And if we get away with it once, twice, ten times, twenty times, does it mean we can do it 100 times or 1000 times?
The problem is that we only need to fail once for it to be game over.
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The psychology of these kinds of situations is insightful. I found the paper, Decisions from Experience and the Effect of Rare Events in Risky Choice (Hertwig et al. 2004) to be especially relevant to this discussion.
To summarize their findings, they point out that decisions from “description” or “experience” are processed very differently. A doctor who has many years of providing vaccinations is likely to have never observed a patient have an adverse effect. A patient reads online that 1/9000 people experience complications. Both doctor and patient are processing the risks of adverse effects, but they are doing it in different ways.
Both kinds of judgment have been studied experimentally. An example of a decision made from description is playing a simple lottery:
Suppose you can take $2 for sure.
OR
You can flip a coin. If you land on heads, you will win $5. Land on tails, you win $0.
Which do you choose?
In this case, the description of the lottery provides clear probabilities and the payoffs.
In contrast, decision-making from experience would have you learn the probabilities and payoffs over time. For instance, I could give you three urns that each contains a total of 100 balls; red or white. The urns have 30, 50, and 70 red balls respectively.
You are given time to sample from each urn. You can take out a ball, mentally note its color and then put it back into the urn. You are allowed to repeat this process as many times as you like.
Finally, you are told to select an urn and pull out a single ball. If it’s red, you will win $5. If it’s white, you will win nothing.
If you spent a sufficient time sampling from the urns earlier, you will readily pick the third urn.
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Where decision-making from experience fails.
Now consider an urn that has 99 red balls and 1 white ball, but the white ball is radioactive. You might sample from that urn 20, 30, or even 50 times and never find that white ball. And maybe those red balls give you a pretty big payout each time. It would be awfully tempting to keep pulling the red balls from that urn.
That is until you stumble into the white ball and you die.
The fickle nature of safety risk in gliding is such that failure is rare, yet catastrophic. Much like sampling from an urn with a radioactive white ball.
And studies show that in such examples, people systematically under-weigh the risks of failure (Hertwig et al. 2004). When people rarely experience bad things, it’s especially easy for them to think it can’t happen to them.
But what about those times we got scared after a “close call”? Or when our friends crash? Usually this gives us pause and gets us thinking about our margins and choices.
The trouble is that when people base their decisions on experience, they over-represent recent events in their memory.
“Rare events have less impact than they deserve not only because decision makers have not encountered them, or have encountered them less frequently than expected, but also because they have not encountered them recently” (Hertwig et al. 2004).
Unless you were recently scared, or someone recently had something bad happen to them, your experience is not necessarily going to help you avoid making a bad decision.
This is especially evident in glider clubs. Someone crashes, maybe even gets hurt and there’s that cathartic moment when everyone becomes safety conscious. Some time passes and everything return to “business as usual”. Then two years later, there’s another accident, and the process repeats itself.
We can’t help ourselves.
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What can we do about it?
One of my club members has a mantra, what can possibly go wrong? It’s usually easy to figure out well in advance that we might get ourselves into serious trouble. Suppose we’re watching our final glide bleed away and become marginal. Well if this continues, we may come up short, or we might just squeak it in. What are our options? What is our plan? How low are we comfortable pressing on?
There’s even more risk soaring in mountains or on ridges. On the Blairstown ridge, there have been countless incidents and accidents. Often time when I pass an accident site, I think about the poor fellow and what happened to him. This keeps reminding me of what could possibly go wrong.
When flying near places where I had scared myself, I visualize what happened. Passing through Snyders, I shudder when I remember how I fell off the ridge to the field below. Or how I crossed over Rt.81 uncomfortably low making the transition over to Bear Mountain. These incidents are seared into my memory and I routinely remind myself about them before entering comparable situations (maybe I should take that thermal an extra 500ft, thank you very much!).
This certainly makes the case that experience is helpful. But the point is that we have to actively summon past experiences for them to be useful.
Short safety talks in competitions or in clubs can also be helpful. Done well, they can remind people of what can go wrong and get them thinking about it in their routine flying.
Training
Training for judgment can be difficult. We try to provide simple tools for success. For example, when we start cross country soaring we are usually given rote heuristics for when to land in a field (3k- choose area, 2k- narrow down, 1k- commit to land). There’s a lot to be said that having strict decision rules is good for keeping us within acceptable margins.
However, this does not work in situations that vary considerably. For instance, ridge soaring does not lend itself well to making decisions by rote. Attempting a transition at a certain altitude can work well with one wind direction, but not if the wind shifts 30 degrees. Experience lets you predict the conditions and make the necessary adjustments. This is what makes it fun, but with room for judgment there is even more room for error.
And if things start going to hell in a hand basket, where and when to leave for a field can be tricky. There are places where you have to be high enough to clear the ridge to make it to fields downwind. Other times, there are fields on the upwind side, but you might have to glide out a considerable distance. Where and when you can make these fields will change depending on the wind speed, direction, expected sink and more. There’s a lot of judgment that goes into maintaining these margins.
It is impossible to prepare for or train for all of these situations beforehand. The only way to deal with these circumstances is to build experience incrementally. Even better is to be guided by experienced coaches or mentors who can alert you as to what can go wrong.
Another way to explore the limits is to fly in the simulator. Condor lets you fail without the consequences. You can see what happens when you fly too slowly near a ridge, turn downwind into the mountain, wait too late to commit to landing and all sort of other common and fatal accidents. This is useful toward learning the boundaries and the limits of what you can get away with.
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Decision-making research shows that glider pilots will nearly certainly under-weigh the likelihood of crashing. And unless we continually remind ourselves of what can possibly go wrong, we are susceptible to making really bad decisions. Experience is worth nothing unless we use it. We must learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others. We must train incrementally and stringently maintain our margins.
And above all, remember that we are our own worst enemies.
Think of your favorite little furry animal. It burns energy all the time in order to stay alive. In order to get more energy, it must travel to places where it can find something to eat. It will spend time at those places, foraging for food and eating. Either when it is satiated, or when the cost of trying to get more food out of a given source becomes too high, it will move on to another food source.
It will have to scurry a certain distance to get to that food source. If this distance is high, then animal is in trouble for it will have little energy left by the time it gets there. If the distance is low, then the creature can be rightfully said to be “fat, dumb, and happy.”
What I just described is broadly an example of “foraging behavior”, something studied by ecologists. These are scientists out there who track animals and watch how they manage the problem of finding food and staying alive.
It probably does not take too much imagination to see how foraging behavior relates back to soaring. A pilot forages for energy by finding thermals, but instead of metabolizing energy biologically, he simply glides it out to the next thermal source. He forages for sites that are worth his time; thermals that are too far away, too weak or the like are not worth the trouble (usually!).
Even some equations in foraging theory have direct similarity to soaring, such as the prescient Marginal Value Theorem (pMVT). This dictates that given perfect information the time to leave a foraging source is when an alternative future source will provide more energy than in the immediate present state. This sounds a lot like MC theory! Leave the current thermal when your climb rate gets below the average expected climb rate for your next thermal. And interestingly enough, this model does a pretty good job of describing the point at which animals leave to a future foraging site.
So looking at foraging behavior, it provides another good analogy as to how glider pilots manage the optimization of climbing and leaving a thermal. Exploit lift until it gets weaker than a future thermal. Explore for an alternative once you cross a given threshold. Simple enough.
However, things get interesting when you start fiddling with the distance between foraging sites. For instance, suppose that there is no possibility of finding any more food beyond this point. It’s winter and your furry animal is at the last food source available. The conclusion is to tank up as much as possible and hope that this will last the creature through the dry spell. This is a similar deal when you have a distance day on a thermal flight and you’re in the last, weak bubble of the day. Take as much as you get and accept that this the best you will do.
But what happens when you’re not really sure whether there will be food at the next foraging sites or not? You go from place to place and you find one empty and another one too. You might even run out of energy and starve!
Suppose you recognize that there is a reasonable possibility that all possible foraging sites may run out while you’re still at a food source. How would this change your behavior?
My guess is that you would take everything you can get out of current foraging sites, accepting greater costs to do so. Your furry animal will eat every scrap off food here, even if its more work to do so. If you look ahead and see a sky that’s decaying and you suspect that this thermal may be your last, then you will be motivated to stay in it, even if its weak. And you will probably do the same thing in the next and subsequent thermal, should you find them and you still judge the conditions to be tricky.
The point is that when the distance that you traverse from a thermal to another thermal is uncertain and may even exceed the total energy you have available, the decision-making is much less straightforward than when you assume you will find a thermal and your goal is to simply optimize the current glide. For people who have followed my writing, this goes back to “Gear Shifting” and my work with John Bird on Bounded Rationality and Risk Strategy in Thermal Soaring. But I figured that this foraging example may be another way to look at risk management in thermal soaring using perhaps intuitive examples and fiddling with their variables.
Reviewing the Ridge Map, I noticed some appalling landouts associated with ridge flying. Falling off of a ridge is about the most dangerous kind of landout situation a soaring pilot can encounter. When you fall off, you typically have very little time and few options to choose from. Usually you must do an abbreviated pattern into your field. Fields near mountains tend to be shorter and more rolling, also increasing risk. These factors require serious consideration in order to make a safe landout.
The disturbing feature of many ridge landouts is the tendency of pilots to make *very low* patterns/approaches into fields. A lot of this is due to their attempts to thermal in weak lift after having fallen off the ridge. I suspect that pilots get more comfortable thermalling low when they spend a long time very close to the trees. The same pilots who would quit well above 500ft are attempting to dig out from 300ft AGL! This is followed by a full pattern initiated at 200ft AGL!
However, looking at these trends, I suspect that pilots lack some guidance as to how to properly conduct a ridge landout. As such, here are some thoughts and guidelines to take a very dangerous situation and make it considerably more manageable.
Preparation
In crucial areas like gap crossings (transitions) or in areas with sparse landing options, it is critical that you know beforehand what your options are. Where fields are sparse, the few fields that are available tend to be marginal. Moreover, you might be forced to make a very low approach into a marginal field that has only one way in. Knowing what you are dealing with and having a plan beforehand can be the difference between success and totalling your glider. When it comes to gap crossings, you might have to make a straight-in into your option. If you know your options and are prepared to do so, your odds of success are a lot better.
Falling off a ridge rarely happens in a heartbeat!
Your situation will slowly deteriorate and you can pick up on this well before you have to commit to a landout. If the ridge is softening up, you will be getting lower and slower. There will be an eery smoothness to the ridge, punctuated by weak little bubbles that hardly improve your energy situation. When you feel this happening, this is your cue to take the next thermal if you find one. At the same time, you should start paying a lot of attention to the fields in the valley below.
Field selection
When the ridge is soft, you should be flying “field to field”. If you’re hanging on the ridge, then keep finding each successive field that you could land in. Should the ridge go from soft to not working, you will be ready to land. Don’t go into an unlandable or marginal area ahead if the ridge is soft!
Remember that many ridge fields can be marginal, so you have to be vigilant in your field selection. Pay a lot of attention to the field’s slope. The best case scenario is that you find a field that has a favorable slope and is perpendicular to the ridge. This way you are on “base” leg while on the ridge. If you choose to commit to the field, then you will have from 500-1000ft AGL to work with, quite reasonable! You will also be landing into the wind, good news! Fields that are parallel to the ridge are fine too, but make sure that you picked up the right side to make your approach.
Falling Off the Back
Sometimes your only good options are on the downwind side of the ridge. These are very tricky situations for several reasons. The first is that you usually have to leave the ridge at a higher altitude than you would if you had a field on the front side. Some ridges have a broad, flat peak and you have to maintain enough altitude to clear over the top of it. This goes back to the business of committing while you still have time and options. Plus or minus 10 seconds can make the difference between clearing the mountain comfortably, to being marginal, to not having enough altitude to make it over. Remember that settling down on the mountain does not happen instantaneously. If the ridge is not supporting you 500ft above, 300ft above, 200ft above, it’s probably not going to do you much good 100ft above the trees. If you’re getting scared, act on it sooner than later.
Secondly, the wind flows on the backside of ridges can be unpredictable and violent. You are heading into the lee sink of the mountain and the wind can curl and do all sorts of wild things. Expect turbulence and sink. Keep your speed up and try to find a large field.
Committing
In thermal soaring, we are trained to transition into “landing mode” at an appropriate altitude. When ridge soaring, we delay this point to an altitude that is considerably lower than under normal conditions. However, the moment you fall off the ridge, this should be your cue to transition into landing mode. Especially if the ridge is weak or you fell off halfway below ridge top, you are likely to be at or below 500ft AGL of the valley floor. You need the altitude to make a safe approach and landing into what is likely to be a trickier than normal field.
Also, the earlier you accept the ridge is not working, the better. If you can’t hang on a ridge 50ft below ridge top, it is probably not going to get better 100-200ft below either. There are exceptions, such as if the ridge is turning toward a more favorable wind angle. But all things being equal, the earlier you accept that the ridge isn’t working, the better. Ridges tend to be sharp at the top and flatter sloped at the bottom. If you leave early, you will maintain a reasonable height AGL, especially if you have to go a ways toward a field in the valley. If you delay several hundred feet, you will be hugging the terrain on your way toward the fields; bad news.
Also, if the ridge is reasonably high, the earlier you leave, the better chance you will have to find a thermal in the valley. Every 100ft makes a big difference in connecting with that thermal. Don’t delay leaving a ridge that isn’t working.
Approach
Now that you’ve committed to landing and picked out your field, you need to deal with the fact that you will probably have to make a low approach into the field. If you don’t have enough height to make a normal pattern, don’t. It is much better to be higher and do an abbreviated approach rather than a low, full pattern with all the associated risks of a stall/spin.
If I have to use an abbreviated pattern, I like to use the “hangglider technique”. I position myself offset from the field and S-turn until I am in a comfortable altitude to make an approach into the field.
In sum, maintain situational awareness of your options, accept defeat early, commit early, and make a safe approach in a field.
My lab invited a very insightful speaker, one who specializes in sports and occupational health psychology. Her area of focus is in how athletes and high-stress workplaces (firefighters, police officers) deal with stress, burnout and engage in recovery techniques.
Naturally, I saw a lot of parallels between her research and glider racing. She makes a very strong case for the need to focus on rest and recovery to achieve optimal performance.
Notes from talk:
– There are several models that describe the stress/recovery cycle. Generally, it is a good analogy to view energy as a limited resource. Recovery serves to replenish the resource. If the subject’s resources get expended quicker than they are replenished, the subject will burn out.
– Burnout/overtraining causes diminished performance.
– Symptoms include: racing thoughts, rumination, fatigue, mood disturbances,
lowered vigor.
– Burnout is described like dehydration. By the time you realize you’re fatigued, it’s already too late. Must have proactive strategies for recovery.
– Stress/recovery follow an S-shaped curve.
There’s a threshold of stress that a person can handle, above which it is almost unrecoverable, except if one allows a very long time. (Longer than the time available in the contest).
– Recovery methods include: sleep, relaxation, social activity, cognitive processes focusing on self-control and concentration.
– Emphasized psychological detachment during rest. Need to dissociate from the stressful activity (good and bad stress).
– Preoccupation as an athlete and ones’ performance hurts recovery. It is good to appeal to other forms of your identity during recovery stages.
– When mind races when trying to sleep, a good strategy is to write in a journal. Develop a habit; write down those items and then once journal is closed, it’s done and accounted for.
– Habituation of recovery strategies, especially sleep is very important. Develop a sleep schedule and stick to it. No computers 30 minutes before shut-eye.
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Actionable goals and items for contest pilots:
Suggested goals:
1) Start the contest with as much energy as possible.
2) Minimize energy lost on each day.
3) Recovery techniques
Being strapped down in a tin can while racing and experiencing things that are not working out for you is emotionally challenging. You see a competitor slip ahead, you fall out of the band, the sky starts deteriorating; all these situations can have powerful emotional effects that can distract you from dealing with these challenges. Being able to minimize negative emotions is therefore quite advantageous to one’s soaring performance.
Psychological research in Emotion-Regulation has some useful insights in this respect. Two commonly studied emotion-regulation techniques are suppression and reappraisal.
Suppression is the act of taking a negative emotion and attempting to minimize it. This is the equivalent trying to contain yourself when you get angry. Studies had shown that trying to minimize the effect of an emotion after the fact is an ineffective strategy.
Reappraisal is the act of reframing your situation in a different light. For instance, if you see high cloud cover move in, you might think that this is an opportunity for you to excel at your weak weather flying while everyone else is going to be scared and suffering.
Research has shown that reappraisal is overwhelmingly a much more effective emotion-regulation strategy. This is because reappraisal has a tendency to take the bite out of the emotional response before it happens; it minimizes the total emotion experienced. As a result, reappraisal strategies could greatly improve performance.
The risk management work that John Bird and I did actually relates to reappraisal. It helps the pilot look at the sky ahead and reason that due to the risk level exceeding a certain threshold, that they must change their strategy. By being able to base risk strategy on something measurable, it allows the pilot to easily reappraise a situation. When it comes time to get into a “risk-minimizing” mindset, it isn’t painful to watch a couple other pilots drive ahead and leaving you behind. Sure, you might be missing out on an opportunity, but looking at the sky ahead, you can just write off those pilots as taking an excessive gamble. As a result, you don’t feel the emotional pain associated with them leaving you behind.
Like many things in aviation, emotion-regulation and reappraisal is part of overall situational awareness. If you judge your priorities correctly and are ahead of your situation, then you will not be as emotionally affected. Conversely, if you are experiencing strong emotional reactions in the cockpit, this is likely to be due to a lack of situational awareness at an earlier point in the flight.
Soaring Economist 