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Thread: wearing a helmet flying

  1. #41

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    If you crash your motorcycle, there is no structure protecting you. Your tender body parts make contact with the ground very quickly. Been there.

    If you crash your airplane, you are in a structure that absorbs energy. And I have witnesses some pretty high speed aircraft impacts with the ground that only resulted in minor injuries.

    Statistics are funny things. Airplanes cover a lot more miles than motorcycles. Per mile I don't buy the notion that airplanes and motorcycles are equivalent. And I will suggest that it is per mile that counts.

    The most critical part of safety is common sense and using your brain. And I look at the concerns expressed here and realize that if aviation worked the way some folks fear, I should have been dead at least 1500 skydives and 3000+ pilot hours ago.

    Go fly. Be happy.

    Best of luck,

    Wes
    N78PS

  2. #42
    steveinindy's Avatar
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    SB, a major reason for the attitude of "you only need it for risky flying" is that a lot of GA pilots are by their very nature rather risk tolerant and pretty sure they are personally better than the average pilot. There is also a healthy degree of fatalism tossed in for good measure (i.e., "If I can't avoid the crash with my superior flying skills, I'm as good as dead any way you shake it") so it's an uphill battle trying to advocate for any sort of changes. Recently, we've also run into the political problem of pilots with "conservative" leanings who view any suggestion of voluntary improvements in the experimental community as a violation of their "Don't Tread on Me" views on their perceived right to kill themselves and their passengers by tolerating the same long standing issues in popular designs and as an excuse to get up on their political soapbox.

    I have a now elderly friend who was part of the initial push for shoulder harnesses in aircraft and recalls how people used to argue that it would prevent you from reaching the controls in an emergency. Some of the rebuttals people try to use are rather laughable both in that case and in the debates going on today.

    My personal take is that I am going to wear a helmet and offer one to whomever flies with me. If you choose to do so and take your chances, so be it.

    Our cars have air bags, collapsible steering columns, safety glass, and other features to protect our heads. By comparison, cockpits are pretty dangerous.
    All of those things are nice but the biggest problem in many cockpit designs (along with insufficient strength of seat anchorages and restraint attachment points) is the lack of longitudinal stiffness which predisposes to collapse of the cockpit. The best airbag or collapsible steering wheel in the world isn't going to do much if you wind up with a Lycoming in your lap because the firewall fails backward in an otherwise low speed survivable crash.
    Last edited by steveinindy; 05-15-2013 at 06:11 AM.
    Unfortunately in science what you believe is irrelevant.

    "I'm an old-fashioned Southern Gentleman. Which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-***** when I want to be."- Robert A. Heinlein.



  3. #43
    steveinindy's Avatar
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    Statistics are funny things. Airplanes cover a lot more miles than motorcycles. Per mile I don't buy the notion that airplanes and motorcycles are equivalent. And I will suggest that it is per mile that counts.
    For crash survivability, "deaths per mile" is a poor comparison. If we had an accurate number for GA operation hours, it might make sense to use "X crashes per 100,000 hours" or something like that but we don't have anything but a rather crude estimate so I argue that those numbers aren't really all that helpful Looking at the survival/injury rate of crashes as a percentage of the total number of crashes is probably the best way to look at it in the setting of determining comparability of crash survivability.

    The most critical part of safety is common sense and using your brain. And I look at the concerns expressed here and realize that if aviation worked the way some folks fear, I should have been dead at least 1500 skydives and 3000+ pilot hours ago.
    Yup. Use your brain to avoid when possible and survive when you can't avoid a crash. Thankfully, most of us (at least those who don't fly ultralights) will never experience a serious crash in our flying careers. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared for it if it happens which is why you have folks like myself who look at this stuff day in and day out to try to figure out the best possible balance between design for operations and design for safety.
    Unfortunately in science what you believe is irrelevant.

    "I'm an old-fashioned Southern Gentleman. Which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-***** when I want to be."- Robert A. Heinlein.



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