Printable View
I think we need some further refinement/division of the topic categories.
"Hangar" is overloaded with posts,and "Oshkosh" gets quite a few.
I definitely think we need a topic alone on the vital subject of safety, as it sometimes gets buried with other less important topics on "Hangar".
What do you think?
Merry Christmas, also.
Bill G
Hey Bill -
I'll see your "Merry Christmas" and raise you a happy new year! (And apologize for not getting back to you before now - my connectivity during holiday travel was maddening.)
Given the relatively modest amount of traffic on the forums, I've absolutely erred on the side of less vs. more when it comes to the individual topic areas - I'd rather see a few boards look a little too full than several boards looking like online ghost towns.
All that said, if there's enough interest in creating a subforum around safety topics, I'd be wide open to considering it. I'm curious to see what some of the other regulars think - chime in and let me know.
Cheers -
Hal
I like the idea of a safety sub-forum.
Daniel Findling
Hal,I don't know how much trouble it is to reorganize a forum or a topic. I am not too good with computers, sort of like a politician, almost any politician, with the truth. I don't have a close relationship with electro tech stuff, it doesn't thrill me and I don't thrill it. The best plane I have ever flown doesn't have any computer stuff, just a great engine and great wings. Even I can understand it.
BUT, I VERY MUCH THINK SAFETY SHOULD BE PART OF THE EAA WEBSITE, AND NOT JUST A SORT OF BY PRODUCT OR AFTERTHOUGHT.
Maybe you would consider giving it a try as a topic of its own.
Lord knows we in sport aviation and all private aviation need a better safety record.
It really hurts when I see something like the Cirrus accident near Chicago with 4 fatalities that can and should be avoided with a little more care and caution.
I will start by noting that I am a minimalist and sometimes a contrarian. And then suggest that my experience is that in an unmoderated, unstructured, aviation forum, everyone's idea of safety tends to be limited to their own experience. And folks tend to express the notion that they are safe but some other guy is not.
Merely posting notifications of accidents without analysis really is not educational. The problem is that it takes a year for the FAA/NTSB to publish real facts about each incident. So any info posted quickly in an internet forum is generally opinion and hearsay. Low quality.
Too many free form discussions about aviation safety tend to be of the tone that only the skill level of the least experienced speaker, or the official book practice, can be "safe". These discussions ignore the real world practical reality that most pilots with 1000hrs can competently do things with airplanes that pilots with 100hrs should not attempt. And that the lawyers have a big influence in what gets official publication, forcing authors to only provide information that can be digested and applied by the lowest common denominator reader. So discussions based on this level of knowledge tend to winds up with the conclusion of "the pilot should not have done that and because they ignored rule XYZ they crashed." Sometimes that is the only conclusion that you can make. In most cases there is more to the story. All of which turns into a mess in an unmoderated internet forum.
I will offer the proposition that this entire web site promotes safety by providing a place that holds lots of good educational info, broken down into appropriate groups of topics. Everyone is pretty polite and folks with a wide range of experience levels participate. It looks from where I sit that the moderators don't have to work to hard.
For an example of a forum focused on an aspect of aviation safety, IAC has an internet forum that is moderated by the chair of the safety committee. Competition pilots like myself work their aircraft much harder than your typical EAA member. Steve Johnson does his best to post hard info, including photos of broken parts. Within that framework, there is little discussion, mostly just the hard data. That said, since we fortunately do not break lots of airplanes these days, not a lot of posting goes on. So I will guess that if this general EAA forum sets up an area like IAC's, with the same type of supervision, I would not expect huge amounts of posts. But that requires active involvement of moderators.
So for this forum, I will vote for the status quo. I believe that there are a LOT of postings here that offer info that advances safety. A folder that actually has "Safety" as a title is not required.
Best of luck,
Wes