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By WhackityWhack
#401111
I have seen that USHPA asks members to report accidents and incidents for several different reasons. One reason is so other pilots can learn from the reports, that sounds good to me. The other fulfills some insurance requirements. There are three forms on the USPHA site. A "preliminary Incident Report", an AIRS "Accident Reporting System" and an "insurance notification report". They can be filled out by the pilot involved or witnesses.

I don't know, but I doubt very many pilots are filling these out. I am wondering if there are any negatives to filling one out. I saw a HORRIBLE crash on landing a couple days ago. Thought the guy might have been dead. Turns out he wasn't thank goodness. I've also seen several other crashes and incidents over the summer. I haven't made any reports and wonder if anyone else has; especially if something happens to them personally.
User avatar
By red
#401117
Whackity,

No matter what goes in, I do not see much if any information on accidents coming out. They say they don't want to feed the lawyers, but the real loss is to the pilots here as a result. I joined USHGA specifically for that information/safety benefit, but it seems that the present Assn. is not the outfit that I joined anymore.
User avatar
By WhackityWhack
#401118
red wrote: Sat Nov 18, 2017 12:11 pm Whackity,

No matter what goes in, I do not see much if any information on accidents coming out. They say they don't want to feed the lawyers, but the real loss is to the pilots here as a result. I joined USHGA specifically for that information/safety benefit, but it seems that the present Assn. is not the outfit that I joined anymore.
So, Red, is there any other place that you know of that we can read accident reports or get valuable information on "What not to do"?
User avatar
By DAVE 858
#401120
So we have a system to report accidents for “education” but USHPA won’t print or publish any details on accidents.... So here’s a question, if someone gets too many reports are they at risk of losing their membership?
User avatar
By red
#401123
DAVE 858 wrote: Sat Nov 18, 2017 12:43 pmSo we have a system to report accidents for “education” but USHPA won’t print or publish any details on accidents.... So here’s a question, if someone gets too many reports are they at risk of losing their membership?
Dave,

In a few extreme cases, I have heard of ratings being put at risk due to safety issues, but not memberships. I can think of many pilots who walked away from the Assn, but only one expulsion (and that was not about safety or accidents). There may well have been more, but probably not for safety issues.
By Charlie Romeo
#401127
It"s no different here in Aust,i used to read up on the accident reports to try to learn something....now i dont bother because the power"s that be keep that sort of thing classified :x
User avatar
By lizzard
#401133
So every body has to spend $24.85 USD ...surely this should be freely available ?
Is it free for members ?
A file to down load or is it a ring binder?
This is vital safety information is it not .?
A synopsis from somebody would be helpful to most .
For my money 24.95 will buy me new lower rigging wire.
Its a shame how the corporate entities we create to serve us become headless monsters that are lawyer driven
Here is a british site that seems accessible
https://www.bhpa.co.uk/documents/safety ... tigations/
I wonder when they will lock it down or charge to look ?

...the sea breeze has just come in here ... gotta go !
User avatar
By red
#401134
lizzard wrote: Sun Nov 19, 2017 12:24 amSo every body has to spend $24.85 USD ...surely this should be freely available ?
Lizzard,

You get a USB flash drive, with a copy of all past issues of the USHPA magazine. They once were scans of the pages, just non-searchable image files. Now they are real digital copies, and you can search for every time a word or name has appeared in the past issues. That is much better if you know what you want to see, such as every article on the Comet, or Moyes, et c. The older issues had individual accident reports, but no longer. In truth, the reports were often repetitious, especially in the area of skills (or lack of same). Equipment failures became rare, and usually came from operator error, such as neglect, or improper use.

IMHO, the Assn would not want to report on the number of PG collapses now, and the results; lately I have heard PG pilots saying that a PG collapse and reserve deployment is not considered an accident these days, if nobody died.

Personally, I am sometimes shocked to find a pilot who still has a reserve deployment bag with the throwing handle at the wrong (closed) end of the bag. I would have thought we corrected that screw-up by the last decade, but some of that junk is still out there. It's an easy fix, and just what I would hope to see explained in our monthly rag, but hey, we can't be talking such hatefulness on our infallible manufacturers, right? Still, you might see it mentioned in an on-line HG forum now and then, where truly vital information can take precedence over the advertising budget.

:mrgreen:
User avatar
By mtpilot
#401135
I read the old magazine archives in winter and throw the new mag in the trash. I think there was a memo about how
the actuaries want more data about a sport they know nothing about. There are many times more incidents than claims
so I guess they want to count every downtube. I wonder why the dues haven't dropped since the rrg is fully funded.
User avatar
By Lucky_Chevy
#401139
I listened to the RRGs presentation. Insurance premiums go to payout claims. Money is also set aside for claims that may later arise for incidents that have occurred and unreported incidents that may result in claims.

The claims for the last year were very low, just a few thousand dollars. The other funding is placed in a type of escrow until the RRG is "in the clear". That time varies from 1-10 years depending on the type of claim. This funding ultimately returns to the general fund of the RRG where it can be used to reduce premiums or pay dividends.

We are a small sport and haven't been producing much data on accident or injury rates. In an effort to reduce claims arising from incidents that were not originally reported the RRG has requested that pilots report all accidents to include blown launches, broken down tubes, unbuckled leg loops, etc. Basically, if something happens that wasn't planned they would like us to file a report. The added data should help reduce the money we are currently setting aside for claims arising from unreported incidents.

Dan
(USHPA Region 9)
User avatar
By DAVE 858
#401141
You could also figure out who the high risk individuals are and eliminate them from the risk pool. I mean thats what auto insurance companies do with bad drivers and life insurance companies with people who smoke. Why would it be wrong to assume that the USHPA is not pushing to do the same thing?

Only now you have a system where pilots can narc out other pilots! How f---ing awesome would it be for an auto insurance company if they could do that same thing with drivers? Instead of accidents and speeding tickets as the only means to assess risk, now you have other drivers assessing who the bad apples are. The closest I have seen to this in the automotive insurance business is progressive's "snapshot" device which allegedly rewards you for good driving habits, but probably also records all of the mistakes you make as well and charges you accordingly.

I guess my point is this. Does anyone out there really think an insurance company has your best interests in mind? News flash folks THEY DONT! USHPA is now an insurance company. So whenever Mark Forbes or any other USHPA zealot comes on here & tells people the dues are going down I just have to laugh because you look ridiculous with that much diarrhea coming out of your mouth.
User avatar
By lizzard
#401143
You are right of course but there is another way that is happening .
The low risk individuals may remove themselves from the insurance pool ...or seek other arrangements.
The decline in hang gliding may be just an illusion of sorts .
There are many who consider that flying is an individual pursuit and not a team sport .
We cant blame insurance companies for being what they are and selling the fear that is their core business. We can take responsibility for our own actions should we be willing and able .
The waiver we are supposed to sign virtually makes a claim an expensive fight ,yet is sold to us as protection.

None the less, we will always unite on site as needed.
Luckily, most of the fools are now suspended from thin ropes with frowning canopies chutes at the ready .
User avatar
By Lucky_Chevy
#401144
To be clear:

The insurance we have protects our sites and spectators. Unlike auto insurance our insurance will not pay for your glider repairs or your medical bills but if you should hurt someone landing on a beach, or damage someone's property on landing the insurance kicks in. Also some of our flying sites require insurance as a prerequisite.

Keeping better records isn't about kicking the high risk pilots out USHPA, it's about developing a statistically significant risk profile for the sport.
User avatar
By mgforbes
#401151
DAVE 858 wrote: Sun Nov 19, 2017 2:45 pm So whenever Mark Forbes or any other USHPA zealot comes on here & tells people the dues are going down I just have to laugh because you look ridiculous with that much diarrhea coming out of your mouth.
It's nice of you to be so complimentary to the guy who has to sit down with the budget and figure out what your dues are going to be in the future. Do you really think I *want* dues to be $150? NO! I think they're way too high. But right now, given the situation we're currently in, that's where they have to be for us to break even and cover our bills. If I could see a way to reduce dues tomorrow, I'd be proposing it at the spring BOD meeting coming up.

The objective is to get our costs down so we can reduce dues to the minimum needed to run the association at break-even. To do that, we need to reduce our biggest cost, which is insurance premiums. To reduce that cost, we need to show a consistent loss history that is significantly lower than our past history. In the long term, if we hold down insurance losses, we'll see a reduction in premiums. But we can make that happen faster if we have better data to put in front of the insurance actuaries that price our risk and set our premiums. That's where you come in.

If we have good data on accidents, incidents, amount of flying and training activity and all the rest, then we have something solid we can go to the actuaries with. Right now we don't have much, but with your cooperation we can fill in the blanks. Your snarky attitude isn't helping, though. We're not out to screw over pilots, jack up the dues to ridiculous levels or spend money frivolously. We're trying to keep the wheels on and avoid crashing. As soon as we can get costs down, we'll bring dues down as well.

We did NOT want to be in the insurance business. We were FORCED to, because our previous insurers dropped our coverage, and without that insurance we would lose most of our significant flying sites. I KNOW this is true, because I dealt with panicked phone calls from chapters all over the country, asking if they were going to be able to get their renewals done in time for flying season. You may dismiss our third party liability insurance as irrelevant, but it's not any such thing. If we don't have that coverage, most of our sites are gone...and the ones that aren't are one lawsuit away from closure. The ripple effect beyond that would effectively end our sport in this country. That's why we had to form our own self-insurance company; to make sure that we could keep flying. And as a side benefit, we get to run it for OUR benefit, not for some profit-seeking investors looking for a high-risk, high-yield way to make money.

MGF
User avatar
By mtpilot
#401156
Mark, I have spoken with you privately but still have concerns. Like whose insurance company is it, and why does it
have to make a profit if ushpa is a non profit? You say dues need to be 150$ to break even? To pay premiums to a policy
we supposedly own?? The RRG is fully funded? To me this all ads up to turning hang gliding over to a few actuaries. No
disrespect intended but I probably don't buy into that idea. I do not believe we even need actuaries in our situation.
By Seahawk
#401162
mgforbes wrote: Mon Nov 20, 2017 3:21 pm We did NOT want to be in the insurance business. We were FORCED to, because our previous insurers dropped our coverage, and without that insurance we would lose most of our significant flying sites. I KNOW this is true, because I dealt with panicked phone calls from chapters all over the country, asking if they were going to be able to get their renewals done in time for flying season. You may dismiss our third party liability insurance as irrelevant, but it's not any such thing. If we don't have that coverage, most of our sites are gone...and the ones that aren't are one lawsuit away from closure. The ripple effect beyond that would effectively end our sport in this country. That's why we had to form our own self-insurance company; to make sure that we could keep flying. And as a side benefit, we get to run it for OUR benefit, not for some profit-seeking investors looking for a high-risk, high-yield way to make money.
MGF
I wonder why the previous insurers dropped our coverage. Could it be that they got wind of USHPA totally ignoring fragrant violations of federal aviation regulations?
User avatar
By mgforbes
#401166
mtpilot wrote: Mon Nov 20, 2017 6:08 pm Mark, I have spoken with you privately but still have concerns. Like whose insurance company is it, and why does it
have to make a profit if ushpa is a non profit? You say dues need to be 150$ to break even? To pay premiums to a policy
we supposedly own?? The RRG is fully funded? To me this all ads up to turning hang gliding over to a few actuaries. No
disrespect intended but I probably don't buy into that idea. I do not believe we even need actuaries in our situation.

1) Recreation RRG is owned by its insureds; that's USHPA, the Foundation, PASA and various individual flight schools. Their ownership shares are proportional to the capital investment each one makes. USHPA owns the majority share of the stock, so its vote is the deciding one. Future profits (or more likely, premium reductions) will flow proportionate to ownership. The capital base of $3 million is not all that's needed, though; that's just the cash to back our bets. We still have to pay for annual expenses on top of that.

2) Recreation RRG is a for-profit insurance company, as required by federal law and the state of Vermont where it is incorporated. We've talked about becoming "self-insured" almost since the start of USHGA, back in the 70's. Until this crisis, there was not a sufficient reason to do it because it's a huge amount of work and money. But now we have no choice. It's a for-profit company, but it's not a for-UNREASONABLE-profit company. All it has to do is make a small profit and cover its expenses, long term. But right now, we have to live with our past history until we can prove things have changed for the better, with actual loss history to back up our argument.

3) Forming a captive insurance company (that's the legal term for it) is not as simple as just raising some money and putting it in the bank. We still have to satisfy the state regulators where we are incorporated, file a lot of paperwork in states all across the country, have annual audits, actuarial analysis and a lot of other stuff. We do not have the option of deciding what our premiums will be. Instead, a licensed actuary firm approved by the state of Vermont conducts an analysis of our risk and decides how much premium we have to charge. We can influence that somewhat by providing more information and detail, which is why I keep talking about accurate and complete accident reporting. Actuaries guess high when there's uncertainty and a lack of data. For 2016, the actuaries told us that we needed to bill about $950,000 in premiums to meet their estimate of our risk, based on our past history with our previous insurers.

4) Running an insurance company is not a zero-cost operation. We insure the first $250,000 of a claim internally, and we lay off the rest of the risk, up to the policy limit, through a reinsurance contract with several Lloyd's syndicates. Yes, the same people who no longer wanted to handle our base coverage. Reinsurance is a different animal with a different risk profile, and we were able to get a reinsurance agreement. We pay a significant chunk of the premium for that, but we are not allowed an operating license without it. We have other costs for management and professional services, audits, and broker fees to First Flight Insurance Group. Having a captive insurer doesn't relieve us of all the overhead costs, particularly in the early start-up phase of operations. As time passes we may be able to reduce some of these costs or find less expensive options. We did not have the luxury of shopping around for the best possible deal; we had to take what we could get on short notice, because we had so little time to put the RRG together. Usually this is a process that takes 2 to 3 years; we did it in under six months.

5) You can review the combined USHPA and RRG financial statements here: https://old.ushpa.aero/member_financials.asp You'll need to log in as a member. In brief, the RRG made about $84,000 profit on earned premiums of $455,000 for the partial year. Expenses were $375,000, of which $141,000 was losses and loss reserves. Actual paid out claims expenses were only $4,350, and the rest is reserves for known incidents, and actuary-computed reserves for unknown incidents that may some day become known. (See where this uncertainty thing comes in?) 2016 was a partial year since we started operations in June. We actually wrote policies totaling $970,000 in gross premium, but then ceded a portion for reinsurance, resulting in net written premium of $815,000. Since revenue is recognized as earned and policies started mid-year, not all of the premium written was earned through the end of 2016. 2017 will be our first full year of operation.

6) Total claims losses for 2016 were $217,000. That's higher than the net of $141K, but the net value has an assumption about reinsurance coverage reimbursements. Of that $217,000 number, reserves for actual incidents that we know about were $40,850. Reserves held for incidents that we DO NOT know about, set by the actuaries based on their analysis of our risk history, were $176,500. These are numbers that flow right to the bottom line profit and loss results. We think the latter number (called IBNR, Incurred But Not Reported) is way too high. But we have to prove that with data in order to convince the actuaries to reduce it.

7) At present, Recreation RRG is capitalized with $3 million, of which $600,000 is in the form of loans called "surplus notes". These are unsecured loans from individual USHPA members, which can only be repaid when the RRG has accumulated enough capital to gain approval from the Vermont regulators. The loans earn interest, capped at 10% per year, proportionate to the RRG's profits. For 2016, the loans earned 3.5% and that amount is compounded annually. The sooner we book the capital, the sooner we can pay off those loans and eliminate that interest payment...as well as rewarding the members who took a huge chance on an unknown and highly speculative investment. They knew going in that they might never see their money again, and they wrote those $100,000-plus checks anyway. We made a good start toward that goal in 2016, and so far 2017 is looking good as well.

There's a lot more to this than just raising some cash and putting it in the bank. Under federal law, we're allowed to incorporate in one state (Vermont) and do business across the country without having to register in every state. We do have to file paperwork notifying the various states that we're doing business there, and there are some filing fees associated with that, but it's far less than what would be required of a commercial company like State Farm. But to be allowed to operate that way, we have to agree to be regulated by a state that has broad approval from other states, and the gold standard for that is Vermont. They specialize in captive insurance, and that's where many captive insurers are based. The Department of Financial Regulation (DFR) oversees captive insurers, conducts reviews and audits of them, and provides approvals for our operation. We have to comply with their requirements, which include the use of Vermont-approved auditors, actuaries and management company.

There's even more info in the board meeting minutes, which are now posted on the USHPA website in the members only section. https://old.ushpa.aero/member_bodminutes.asp

MGF
User avatar
By mgforbes
#401167
Seahawk wrote: Tue Nov 21, 2017 12:09 am I wonder why the previous insurers dropped our coverage. Could it be that they got wind of USHPA totally ignoring fragrant violations of federal aviation regulations?
In a word, no. I don't know what "fragrant" violations you're alluding to, but that was no part of the decision. Instead, it had a lot to do with a bad run of losses over several years, coupled with a key underwriter who'd been handling our business for years moving on to a new syndicate which did not wish to continue that line of business. In the insurance industry, it's very much a matter of personal relationships; something I'm learning about, as it's much different than in engineering and design, where my background is. It's all about who you know, and the web of interpersonal trust that is built over time.

MGF