http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=29611
A bad day gliding
Dave Pendzick (DAVE858) - 2013/07/29 14:15:01 UTC
Oregon
I was at Woodrat this weekend and launched around 1pm. Everything felt square prior to launch and I started to run. I felt the glider load the hang strap...
As you were one hundred percent positive it would do so two seconds BEFORE you started to run.
...and I reached down with my left hand to grab the basetube and upon doing this I dragged my left wingtip. This pointed me towards the trees and I corrected and narrowly missed hitting the treeline.
The air was really rough this day, it was hot and very turbulent and there really was not much lift around despite it being breezy. I scratched around a while and got one thermal that put me above launch. There was so much turbulence I actually got a little nauseated. I decided at that point to call it. I flew to the LZ and caught a rotor about ten feet up which dropped me like a stone and I bent a down tube...
Good thing you were upright with your hands on the downtubes practicing for your narrow-dry-riverbed-with-large-rocks-strewn-all-over-the-place landing. If you'd been prone with your hands on the basetube going for a wheel landing you might have broken your neck instead of bending a downtube.
I have been going over the entire situation and have learned several lessons. Dont be in a rush!
Might wanna apply that lesson to your writing. If you run spellchecks before you post you tend not to skip as many apostrophes.
I had not flown in almost two weeks and I was hot for it and I did not want to wait until Glass Off to fly, which had I done so, I would have had an awesome two plus hour flight instead of a 45 minute flush-out that ended in a broken downtube.
I also should have waited until I was away from the hill a ways before placing one hand on the base tube... I was never taught to do this and the only reason I think I did was because I was in a hurry and wanted to be flying right away. This mistake almost killed me, it did not really sink in until well after the end of the day how serious this actually was.
It wasn't a fraction as serious and likely to kill you as not making sure you felt the glider loading the hang strap two seconds before you started to run. And we're about due for another one of those.