President's Letter to Delegates and Committee Chairmen 2008-4

SAILPLANE ACCIDENT INVESTIGATION

COCKPIT DAMAGE REPORT

http://www.ostiv.fai.org

Dear Delegates

For more than a decade the Sailplane Development Panel, SDP, the technical body of OSTIV, has been working on improvements to sailplane cockpit design to help reduce injuries to the occupants during survivable crashes.

The OSTIV Airworthiness Standard has recently been updated to include technical requirements to improve safety and these requirements are being prepared for inclusion in EASA CS-22, the airworthiness standard for sailplane design.

Part of this process of continuous improvement relies on feedback from actual accidents. The SDP requires data about the damage to the cockpit area arising from an accident. This data is not necessarily provided by official accident reports.

The OSTIV SDP has, therefore, in close cooperation with the manufacturers, prepared a special report form for describing damage to the cockpit, including the use of photographs to illustrate the damage.

This form – the Cockpit Damage Report (CDR) – is available in English on the OSTIV website at http://www.ostiv.fai.org. The form can be found by:

• Clicking on the OSTIV Logo
• Clicking on "what’s news"
• Clicking on the 2006 edition "Cockpit Damage Report Form now available"
• Under "Crashworthiness" you will find two documents, the CDR and CDR Explanation.

Although this report is not mandatory, future improvements in safety and crashworthiness, for both existing and new sailplanes, will benefit from this data being
available.

The OSTIV SDP and the manufacturers urge you to request that your safety officers send CDRs to OSTIV for all survivable crashes.

From the IGC viewpoint, I believe that we need to look at making this report mandatory.

The numbers of injuries and fatalities occurring in our sport is not acceptable and we need to ensure that people can see that our sport is safe and low-risk. I appreciate that it cannot be risk-free, but every step we can take to reducing the risk – be it pilot training or cockpit design or other mitigations – must be explored.

The OSTIV Cockpit Damage Report is one way we can provide real data back to the manufacturers to help them understand how they can provide better protection for the pilot.

Please spread the word about this report amongst your members.

My thanks to Helmut Fendt, OSTIV SDP Chairman, for the information on the CDR.

Bob Henderson
President, IGC
18th September 2008