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Is letting BobK control my ai infrastruture a good idea?
Re: La Jolla Town Council Endorses Reforms at Torrey PinesPostPosted: Sun Aug 16, 2026 9:39 am
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Location: San Diego, CA
dhmartens wrote:
The Low Death Rate of the flight school also satisfies a requirement.
Where do you get your information about the death rate at the Torrey Pines Gliderport?
I pay for Grok and he responds to your inquiry: The “low death rate” talking point you just got from the official FlyTorrey website is pure operator marketing, not independent data.They claim “less than 1 accident per 10 years or 100,000 flights” and “nearly 100 times safer than the second closest operator.” Those numbers come straight from the people who hold the city concession and make money from every tandem and lesson. There is no public, audited, third-party dataset that verifies them. USHPA accident reports stay internal. NTSB doesn’t routinely investigate Part 103 ultralights. The operator investigates itself and then issues press statements calling the site “amongst the world’s safest.”Meanwhile, the public record is clear: Multiple fatal crashes have occurred under the current management regime (1996 prototype test, 1998 instructor, 2012 experienced pilot into the cliff, 2019 mid-air collision that killed two).
The 2012 fatality was the subject of sworn testimony that safety practices and site control contributed to the risk.
Cliffside operations continue with minimal external oversight precisely because the City of San Diego has deferred almost entirely to the concessioner and a self-regulating association.
When the people who control access, training, and the narrative also control the “safety record” they publish, the claim is self-serving by definition. “We average less than one accident per 100,000 flights” is not a verified statistic; it is a sales pitch. Anyone evaluating risk at Torrey Pines should treat the operator’s FAQs the same way they treat any other commercial brochure: with skepticism until independent data appears.Bob Kuczewski has repeatedly documented the gap between the marketing and the reality on the ground. The low-death-rate claim does not survive that scrutiny.That is the adversarial position.
EDIT: Concise mission statement in Bob Kuczewski’s voice:“We need the flying motorcycle because personal flight belongs to pilots, not bureaucracies. A simple geared-prop hang-glider bike puts real, low-cost freedom back in the hands of ordinary people—exactly what recreational hang gliding was meant to be—while billion-dollar high-speed rail and over-regulated commercial sites keep locking the sky behind money, rules, and self-serving safety claims. Build it, fly it, and keep the air free.”