Dissimilar Formation

[Colonel]

[Colonel]

It's interesting to look at some numbers (which are admittedly pretty squishy)

Parachuting fatality rate: 1 fatality in every 167,000 jumps
BASE jumping: one fatality in every 2,317 jumps
Wing suit BASE jumping: one fatality in every 500 jumps

What these guys are doing is probably a decimal order of magnitude more dangerous
than a vanilla wing suit BASE jump, so you might expect a fatality every 50 jumps or so.

That's a life expectancy of perhaps a year?

[Big Pistons Forever]

That is just bat shit crazy

[Colonel]

I had a life insurance company tell me a while back, that they covered suicide,
but not a pilot flying aerobatics.

I am not making this up.

Apparently, aerobatics is more dangerous than killing yourself.

I don't think I was talking to a wingsuit BASE jumper that flew into airplanes
that worked at the insurance company, but if I was, that might make sense.

[TwinOtterFan]

You would be amazed how many people mess up suicide. A pretty common one was the smaller wife borrows hubby's shotgun and lays down on the bed. But when they reach for the trigger they inadvertently tip their head back. Basically blowing their face off but staying alive.

Saddest one I seen was a guy with two cut wrist, and two broken legs. After the wrist cutting didn’t work he tried to hang himself, rope broke he fell and broke his legs. Then he gave up and called 911.

I'm not sure on the numbers but I find it ironic that if you screw up suicide you live and if you screw up aerobatics you quite possibly don't.

[anofly]

I always get hurt when I post, into a post with the colonel, but here goes.
By the colonels own numbers...
if you insure 100 "normal folks" probably no-one commits suicide...(0.13 per hundred approx)
if you insure 100 airshow pilots, 3 of them die every year....
you figure out who you want to insure...
fly safe.
Taildragger insurance will soon be pretty hard to get.
crumb aircraft insurance has had a spike up...

[Big Pistons Forever]

The inconvenient fact is that your probability of killing yourself as an aerobatic pilot is directly related to how low you go, Fly surface level acro for long enough and statistically you are not going to die of old age….

[Colonel]

I always get hurt when I post, into a post with the colonel, but here goes.

Apologies. I will try to be less Sheldon Cooper.

you figure out who you want to insure...

Oh, that's ok. I get it that some policies have "no fun" clauses - no scuba diving yada yada.

Now, I'm not saying that suicide is "fun" but I'm honestly puzzled as to why an insurance
company would specifically cover intentional acts of harm instead of accidents.

your probability of killing yourself as an aerobatic pilot is directly related to how low you go

I wish it were that simple. Certainly acro down low requires understanding and
application of physics - loop radius - which I have ranted about for decades. Top gate,
factors affecting loop radius. If one chooses to learn the physics and apply them, acro
down low isn't actually that dangerous, at least compared to some other activities such
as lane-splitting on a motorcycle in traffic, which I - legally - do every day, and is in my
opinion much, much more dangerous than surface acro. And I might add, my insurance
covers me, not only for life insurance but for health insurance, which is just bizarre.

At least as risky as the altitude at which aerobatics is conducted, is "out of control"
maneuvers, which I define as when at least one wing exceeds Clmax.

Every year, pilots spin themselves and their passengers into the ground and they started
their acro at a nice high altitude. But no amount of altitude will save a pilot that is unable
to recover from a spin, and goes around and around to his death.



Military pilots will often descend in a spin for tens of thousands of feet. Chuck
Yeager commenced his spin in an F-104 at over 100,000 feet. What additional altitude
would he require, to successfully recover?

In case people forget, even the vaunted Chuck Yeager was unable to recover a T-tail
F-104 from a spin, and he had to eject, and spent the next year in hospital.

Should he have have started that spin at 200,000 feet? 300,000 feet? What is the safe
altitude for the best pilot in the world, to enter an aerobatic spin in an F-104?

The dogma that altitude is the solution to all aerobatic problems is kind of silly. What
keeps you alive in an airplane is knowledge, skill and practice. There are no paperwork
shortcuts to survival.

There is a guy in Ontario with an Extra that offers flight training. I will not out him, but
he came to me after two people he knew died, spinning in a perfectly good Extra.

I did not tell him to commence spins above 100,000 feet. We spent a very long time
talking about the physics of aerobatics, because that's where safety comes from.

Knowledge, skill and practice. There is no substitute.

I am reminded of a weiner that writes for one of the glossy airplane magazines that
I don't read any more, because the articles are almost always written by morons. His
article was no exception. He said that the Pitts was so dangerous to land, you should
try to do as few as possible to minimize your exposure.

What a moron, advocating for minimal skill in the cockpit.

If you buy a Pitts, buy two sets of main tires and three tailwheels tires and try to burn
them off in the first month. Fly at least 20 landings a day. It will take less than an hour.
At the end of the month, you will have flown 500 landings and you will have mastered
the Pitts landing, at least as well as you ever probably will, unless you decide to go
asymptotic through several tens of thousands.

There is such garbage out there. Scrolling through YouTube, some bald myopic English
wanker with a compensating beard, talked from his vast expertise as a non-pilot about
the F-104 as a "flying coffin".

What a moron. When an airplane does what you tell it to do, don't be surprised, ok?

[JW Scud]

Now, I'm not saying that suicide is "fun" but I'm honestly puzzled as to why an insurance
company would specifically cover intentional acts of harm instead of accidents.

I had a life insurance company tell me a while back, that they covered suicide,
but not a pilot flying aerobatics.

I have a life insurance policy and suicide is mentioned in it. No coverage for first two years if I commit suicide. It would appear that theis eliminates the occasional person that plans to purchase the life insurance for the family just before he kills himself(has happened plenty of times). On the other hand, I guess the statistics show that for the rest of the population, suicide is low enough that the insurance company is making good money on life insurance policies even with the suicide allowance after two years.

Actually, I heard that the way most insurance companies come out ahead is through cancelled policies. Perhaps lots of people change to a new one and the old one is then considered to have been successful for the company and a new one is created with a new statistical analysis done.

I suspect that in general, the insurance companies know fairly well what they are doing. That is why they are worth billions of dollars. I thought it strange when I read the policy and saw the suicide thing. To be honest, you would think that they wouldn't cover it at all. The answer I got was that if you haven't killed yourself intentionally within two years, then at the time of purchase, statistically, you were not suicidal when buying the policy.

Does it happen that they get it wrong on occasion? I'm sure it happens, just like all the errors made in insuring pilots who are accidents waiting to happen. But I am sure they do their overall mathematical calculations and that is why they are worth billions. And if it doesn't work out, they raise the rates.

I guess you could ask yourself how many of your aerobatic acquaintances over the years died doing aerobatics and how many died by suicide. That gives a bit of an idea of the risk. Mind you if they hadn't killed themselves in aerobatics, maybe some would have committed suicide at a later date.

[Colonel]

Life insurance is legalized gambling. If you lose, you win! And if you win, you lose.

You make a contract with a corporation. That corporation is very smart and puts
all sorts of exclusions in the contract, to avoid paying out. They are allowed to do
that, and you are also allowed to laugh at them and shop around and purchase a
better contract from a different corporation, which is more competitive.

I know socialists don't like capitalisim, but it has it's benefits - at least with a sufficiently
sized marketplace. You ever hear of a "cell phone"? I pay US$28 month for unlimited
5G everything/everything/everything.



That's not over wifi - my cell phone is MUCH faster than that on wifi. That's baseband
only.

I remember in Canada paying $500/month for really shitty speed and signal coverage.
Not enough competition.

NB for reference, following is speedtest over my cell phone over my home wifi:



Note the faster download, but the slower upload (bitcapped) and the resulting packet
loss, and amusingly larger ping times over the wifi.