So here's the landing for which one hundred percent of Hang Zeroes begin training on Day One, Flight One and work their entire careers to perfect so's they'll be able to pull it off flawlessly WHEN - not IF - they find themselves in a similar situation:
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regardless of any complications involving thermals, gusts, lulls, rotors, direction shifts, invisible dust devils. (Or maybe you'll only go down in narrow dry riverbeds with large rocks strewn all over the place when the air is glassy smooth - u$hPa's not entirely clear on the issue.)
After one has gotten his Five and run a hang gliding school for thirty or forty years it will look like this:
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one out of ten attempts on the home Happy Acres putting green - as long as the air isn't doing anything the least bit interesting.
Here's one of the strips at which people actually land and occasionally kill themselves as a consequence of practicing to safely land in a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place and getting hit by an invisible dust devil at a hundred feet:
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(Pity Joe Julik didn't attempt to hook the invisible dust devil and climb back out. Oh well...) (And funny that one never hears about Dragonflies or conventional fixed wing aircraft getting killed by invisible dust devils leaving or approaching runways.)
And here's an LZ at which a Four with a couple of decades under his belt, a great pilot, can come in with plenty of speed and correct for a thermal pop - like one of the thermal pops he'd shortly before been exploiting to kick everyone else's asses - and get killed instantly:
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http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=33504
Another fatal accident
Rodger Hoyt - 2015/10/13 17:06:30 UTC
That's a fundamentally flawed landing field. Too narrow, too much tree rotor. I wouldn't go near that even as an emergency bailout (especially with a 42-foot span rigid). It's just a matter of time until another accident there.
Got it, people of varying ages?
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Safe landing option for any solid 2.0 with the perfected flare timing commensurate with his rating.
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Unsafe at any speed for any pilot of any rating in any conditions.
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P.S. - 2015/11/19 21:20:00 UTC
And note the absence of little wind flags planted near the touchdown point in the safe landing environment.
