Origins: where the ideas came from

The accident, 1995 #

In July 1995 Mike crashed hard on a top landing during production test flying for Wills Wing. He had been making that landing about a hundred times a year for the previous fifteen years. He could find no mistake in how he flew the approach, which left one conclusion: the error was the decision to attempt the landing at all.

Ok. So twenty years ago I had a hang gliding accident that led me to start thinking about how we make decisions that impact our safety. (SETP talk, 2015)

The full story: Case study · The 1995 top landing.

The first article, 1998 #

Three years after that, I wrote these thoughts out in some detail, in much the same form as I’ve talked about them today, in an article for the national Hang Gliding Magazine.

The article, “Why Can’t We Get A Handle On This Safety Thing?”, appeared in the September 1998 issue of Hang Gliding magazine. Read it at willswing.com.

The paper, 2015 #

And eventually I began to ask myself whether any of these ideas might have some broader relevance.

Mike adapted the ideas for SETP and first presented them at the SETP West Coast Section Symposium in San Diego on March 27, 2015, then at the Flight Test Safety Workshop in Scottsdale in May and the SETP 59th Annual Symposium in Anaheim in September. The paper, Lessons Learned and Murphy’s Corollary, follows the form of the talk.

Seven weeks before the first presentation, on February 3, 2015, he made a launch he later judged a bad decision, under the pressure of a certification deadline. Case study · The 2015 certification launch.

The paper · Where it has been presented.

Since the paper #

In January 2018 he gave a longer, hour-long version at Gulfstream Aerospace: Two versions of the talk.

In September 2021, in Flight Test Safety Fact, Mike answered Art Tomassetti’s May 2021 piece on skill and luck with “Lucky or Good – Further Thoughts”: Luck and uncertainty. A short letter to the editor, Mark Jones Jr., ran with it, dating the accident to July 1995.

In May 2024 he talked about the paper with Art Tomassetti on On Condition, the Flight Test Safety Committee’s podcast. In June 2025 he gave a brief to the joint technical meeting of SETP, the Society of Flight Test Engineers (SFTE) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) on organizational safety culture, the 2D risk matrix and owning the risk: Three Random Thoughts On Safety.

Timeline #

@misc{meier2026origins,
  author = {Meier, Mike},
  title  = {Origins: Where the Ideas Came From},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Edition 1.0},
  url    = {https://meiersafe.com/origins/}
}