"You see, here’s how I think it works. The overriding determinant of pilot safety in hang gliding is the quality of pilot decision making. Skill level, experience, quality of equipment; all those things are not determinants. What those things do is determine one’s upper limits. More skill gives you a higher limit, as does more experience or better equipment. But safety is not a function of how high your limits are, but rather of how well you stay within those limits. And that, is determined by one thing; the quality of the decisions you make"
"And here’s where we get caught by a mathematical trap. Let’s say I’m making my decisions at the 99% level, and so are all my friends. Out of every 100 decisions, 99 do not result in any negative consequence. Even if they’re bad decisions, nothing bad happens. Since nothing bad happens, I think they’re good decisions. And this applies not just to my decisions, but to my friends’ decisions as well, which I observe. They must be good decisions, they worked out didn’t they? The next natural consequence of this is that I lower my decision threshold a little. Now I’m making decisions at the 98% level, and still, they’re working out. The longer this goes on, the more I’m being reinforced for making bad decisions, and the more likely I am to make them.
Eventually, the statistics catch up with me, and my descending threshold collides with the increasing number of opportunities I’ve created through bad decisions. Something goes wrong; I blow a launch, or a landing, or get blown over the back, or hit the hill on the downwind side of a thermal. If I’m lucky it’s a $50 downtube or a $200 leading edge. If I’m unlucky, I’m dead."
"But let’s first ask this question, if we wanted to address this problem of bad decisions being reinforced because they look like good decisions, how would we do it? The answer is, we need to become more critically analytical of all of our flying decisions, both before and after the fact. We need to find a way to identify those bad decisions that didn’t result in any bad result. Let’s take an example. You’re thermalling at your local site on a somewhat windy day. The thermals weaken with altitude, and the wind grows stronger. You need to make sure you can always glide back to the front of the ridge after drifting back with a thermal. You make a decision ahead of time, that you will always get back to the ridge above some minimum altitude above the ridge top; say 800 feet. You monitor your drift, and the glide angle back to the ridge, and leave the thermal when you think you need to in order to make your goal. If you come back in at 1000′ AGL, you made a good decision. If you come back in a 400, you made a bad decision. The bad decision didn’t cost you, because you built in a good margin, but it’s important that you recognize it as a bad decision. Without having gone through both the before and after analyses of the decision, (setting the 800 foot limit, observing the 400 foot result), you would never be aware of the existence of a bad decision, or the need to improve your decision making process."