Hadewych van Kempen <<hadewychvankempen>> writes

Having fifteen years of experience in rulemaking and influencing peoples’ behavior, partly in the Dutch aviation authority, I’d like to put forward a few thoughts on rules that are intended to make hang gliding safer.

I wonder what exactly is meant with ‘making hang gliding safer’. We probably want less accidents in hang gliding, or less fatalities and injured people. So what do we want to change, peoples behavior when they’re flying, the conditions people fly in, or the material they fly with? To answer that question you have to know what causes accidents and what the probability is of a particular kind of accident to occur as a consequence of one particular cause. That’s what you need scientific research for, I won’t go into the details of proper policy-relevant research here.

Since we don’t register accidents properly, there is no decent data, but I’d guess more people die or get injured in launching and landing accidents than in tumbles and collisions. That is not to say that we shouldn’t try to prevent tumbles, but it might just be a small gain in the overall safety of hang gliding.

Suppose it’s proven that less accidents occur if sprogs are set to certain angles (this is a different thing from proving that a glider has pitch up at certain sprog settings. Pitch up is one indicator of safety, but certainly not the only one). Also suppose we have found a certain method to measure sprog settings (as a matter of fact, we haven’t. In the trade of rulemaking, it’s good practice not to set rules when it’s impossible to measure the norms).

But suppose we know the angle sprogs should be set to be safe, now we want pilots to set their sprogs high enough to achieve less accidents. All pilots, but it’s reasonable to think that especially competition pilots will want to turn down their sprogs, since they need speed (apart from confidence, good handling, etc). How to get them to do this?

The German DHV is convinced people only behave the way they are forced to behave. So you set norms (limits to the sprog settings), you inspect whether pilots actually conform to those norms, and you punish those who don’t until they abide by the rules.

In government and policy sciences, this is quite an old fashioned view. The modern idea is that you try to get people to comply spontaneously. The way to get this spontaneous behavior is by informing people, educate them, train them. Or seduce them, by giving rewards for conforming. Or stimulate them by giving those who comply an advantage over non-compliers. Forbidding something leads to the suspicion people will try to break the rules, and you’ll end in a spiral of controlling and punishing the rule breakers ever more severely, while those rule breakers will behave more and more childish, not taking responsibility for their own behavior, but thinking up ways to duck the rule without getting caught.

Here is the fundamental issue: who is responsible for the safety of pilots? Pilots take risks, as do people in other sports. By training and certification (preferably of production processes, not of individual gliders) and the spread of information about hazards we can collectively try to decrease the risks involved in hang gliding. All this helps pilots to make decisions about the risks they are prepared to take. As long as a person is not putting another in danger, no organisation has the right to tell him what to do or not to do. Any organisation that exists to further the interests of pilots, has a responsibility to help them to decrease risks. They have no right to tell us which personal risks we may or may not take.