Fliers impact

[M24_SWS]

I am just about ready to get my rifle out on the range and do shooting from 100 yards up to 500 yards and doing as much positional shooting as I can. With that said, I saw this article and it talked about fliers are NOT MISTAKES, in that they tell a story to the shooter.

The Truth About Barrel Length, Muzzle Velocity and Accuracy | The Truth About Guns

Granted the article above talks about barrel length and accuracy but I see posts on this website where people talk about themselves shooting great but they get a "flier".
"In layman’s terms, this means that the barrel could fire an indefinite number of rounds into a circle with an average diameter of 1.53 MOA, which is not all that impressive. However, it must be understood that accuracy does not work like traditional manuals dictate. As an example, a man takes his new rifle to the range. He sets up his targets and fires several five shot groups. His groups are respectable by most standards, with most clustering at around .75 MOA. He sets his zero and continues to fire.
Here is the important part: he fires another group and gets a ‘flier’ one MOA low and left. He discards it and continues, discarding all the fliers he gets. Now it gets hard for him to figure out. He shoots five shots and notices that he gets a .25 MOA group, but .8 MOA low and .45 MOA right. This is a great group, and he scratches his head and adjusts his scope to it. He shoots again, but prints a wide group measuring 1.2 MOA across, but now shifted off his zero. He assumes that he has run his luck out, packs up, and goes home.
What has happened here has happened to many people. What our friend did not realize was that his gun was never zeroed at all. The tight cluster he got was not the time he did it right, it was a statistical possibility that comes from firing. In reality, the man had a rifle that was not shooting .75 MOA, but rather he was printing groups and ignoring his most important ally, his fliers. These are critical to rifle accuracy and are not mistakes."

If a shooter does the fundamentals correctly and having match ammo and a good rifle then I would be thinking that a flier could not be a shooter mistake because any potential issues could be ruled out.

So my main question is: What does a flier tell you?


Thank you,

Heath

 

[KYpatriot]

The difficulty is in two things: that most people think the flier is the fault of the rifle and when in truth it is usually the shooter, and second it sometimes it IS the rifle if we have unrealistic expectations of its precision because we don't understand the use of statistics.

It takes a LOT of discipline and a mental checklist to drive the rifle the same every time...same exact body position, hand positions, same pressure on the cheekweld, same exact trigger pull and follow through. I find that unless I mentally check each of these off as I address the rifle, I will end up dropping one of them and won't drive the rifle to its full potential. Usually if I see a flier I can think through the shot and realize I didnt do one of those things. The further the target, the more I tend to believe it was me, because the shooters job to account for all variables gets increasingly harder with range and few people can consistently call wind within 1 mph for example.

The other thing is that just because a rifle and shooter combo print a half inch group at 100 yards once does not mean the rifle will always do that even if "you do your part." The random deviation in a group means that sometimes sources of deviation offset and the round falls closer, and sometimes they stack and the round falls farther from the group. You get a truer picture of actual performance when applying statistical tools to your analysis...which for a shooter means more shots in a group and more groups will increase the confidence that you are getting a true picture of what the rifle/shooter is capable of on a consistent basis. This is why Snipershide has asked users not to post 3 shot groups...they just dont give you very reliable information. Better yet, the dot drill is an even better test of the kind of capability most of us around here care about - which is the ability to accurately engage a small target with one shot rather than a precise group off target. Benchrest group shooting, while cool as a sport, is not what the focus is here, and why typically we only use groups to validate zero or test a new load.