Mike Meier has relaunched meiersafe.com, his website on safety and how pilots and organizations make decisions about risk. The new site went live on November 10, 2026.
The site grows out of Mike’s September 1998 Hang Gliding magazine article, “Why Can’t We Get A Handle On This Safety Thing?” He wrote it after his 1995 top-landing accident at Marshall Peak. It argued that a pilot’s safety is determined not by skill, experience or equipment but by the quality of the pilot’s decisions, and that a long run of good outcomes can hide a run of bad decisions. The test he proposed was “Not just, ‘Did I get hurt on that flight?’, but ‘Could I have gotten hurt?’” In 2015 Mike expanded the argument into “Lessons Learned and Murphy’s Corollary.” The paper won the Society of Experimental Test Pilots’ Jack Northrop Award for the most outstanding technical paper at its West Coast Symposium. He has since presented it to test pilots, hang glider pilots, aerospace companies and the USHPA Board of Directors. On December 11 he will give it to the current class at the National Test Pilot School in Mojave.
This year SETP made Mike a Fellow. He joined the Society in 1994 and became an Associate Fellow in 2018. As a developmental, experimental and production test pilot for Wills Wing, he flew 492 prototype configurations, 127 of which went into production, and the production test flights of 6,355 gliders.
The site offers three ways in:
- Pilots: a five-minute summary of the argument, and a method for checking each successful flight against a safety margin set beforehand.
- Instructors and safety officers: a Briefing Kit with the recording of his SETP talk, a briefing outline, slides, a one-page handout and discussion questions. Mike’s own material is free to use with credit.
- Organizations: “Three Random Thoughts On Safety” (2025), on a safety culture in which anyone can say stop, why a small risk repeated often enough becomes a large one, and what it means to own a risk you accept.
Six case studies set Mike’s own accident and a 2015 certification launch beside Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia and the F-86 aileron bolt.
Visit meiersafe.com, or read the original 1998 article here on willswing.com: Why Can’t We Get A Handle On This Safety Thing?