I agree that the fast pass is likely to carry more energy, however for the majority of the circuit the aircraft is pointed away from the flightline, so that energy is also directed away from the flightline. That may of course vary depending on PCM/PPM choice, PCM failsafe settings etc - but in my experience the mast majority of PCM users set their failsafe to "hold", so I'm basing the above on that.


Also, If I have a radio glitch while hover, my pcm system will simply shut down my throttle and I'm left with a broken plane almost directly under where I was hovering. If I'm doing a high speed pass however....


Again, that depends on both the position of the aircraft at the time of the glitch, and the failsafe settings (if any). Not everyone is as smart as you when it comes to these settings. Since most people (in my experience) wrongly look at failsafe as a way to try to save their aircraft rather than a way of reducing risk to life & limb, they tend to set "hold" ... which would not be pretty for a 40% aircraft that is hovering 25ft in front of me. Additionally, consider the failsafe delay... I see an awful lot of people selecting 1 second - and that's plenty of time for a close-in aircraft to tilt inwards and shew me up while it's waiting for either (a) a valid signel, or (b) 1 second to elapse before engaging failsafe settings.

Again, I'm not trying to suggest that high-speed passes are safe and hovering close-in is not - I'm just trying to point out that if we think things through then we can in each case figure out whether there is an easy way of reducing the risk without killing off the fun.

Regs,
Gordon