Guys,

some good food for thought being debated, BUT please let's have it in a way that suggests it is "part" and not the "whole" of the matter. Safety is a process not an item.

Safety is about many things but being dynamic to change is one of them. If the wind direction changed during a display, your considerations for safety might also need to change..... Thus risk is dynamic, so is safety, move with the situations.

Like when you break down on a motorway, the safest thing is to be up on the bank away from the traffic. But safer still is not to be a pedestrian on the motorway, but when you started to drive down it, you didn't think you would break down.

Inert engines are safer than firing engines, so in loss of control, it would seem that it would be logical to turn the motor off. But gravity might well be your engine in a loss of control situation, and although it would therefore be of mute advantage, its still something to do. Good example is the helicopter. When I smashed mine up it took me a mintue to catch hold of it, the battery ejected on impact with the throttle at 3/4. If it had been a failsafe, the motor would have probably shut down. Have you tried to catch a raging heli on the floor, not risk free I can tell you!

We have to depart a little from full size practice as in loss of control situations, they will do everything they can to ensure that they survive and in most cases cause less danger to other life, and yep the pain of a few thousand bucks or quid is a hard one to bear, but who would be the hero?

Perhaps as an example of dynamic thinking what we should be considering is whether PCM is THE answer for all situations, or is PPM, and the answer probably is in different situations one could be more appropriate that the other. Let's get the views.

In reality and Eddies post was most interesting, all we can really do is our utmost to avoid aircraft to person contact in terms of flying, and attempt to eliminate ground incidents which could range through compressor explosion, fingers etc being ingested to burns, fires and battery explosions. The danger comes from various sources such as batteries, fuel, tubing etc etc.

But note, the lottery odds are greater than Eddies and there are hundreds of winners, and those odds proved tragically what statistics can show us to two people who had come to enjoy some of our hobby.

Maybe we could all together structure this debate one item at a time, and draw up a list of best practices. I know there are lots of rules here and there, but is there any harm in going through them again, and writing up new and non considered ones? Like I say all we are doing is getting people to think and act safely.

I've seen horrible things down to human behaviour, but when I don my uniform I still try to make it better, and educate as many as I can in the hope that we will ALL be safer,

Gazzer