landing

General discussion about the sport of hang gliding
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Tad Eareckson
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Re: landing

Post by Tad Eareckson »

Houston Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hhpa/
Dave Susko - 2010/11/05 03:07:47 UTC

So let's say you somehow figure out a way to make towing perfectly safe. What are you going to do about landings. People land badly all the time. Wheels you say? Brilliant! Now, tell me what you do when your chosen LZ is a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place. Better yet, you see what looks like a large green pasture so you head over there only to find out that it is in fact filled with seven foot high corn, and now there is no usable LZ within glide. Wheels probably won't help you in either case.
Tad Eareckson - 2010/11/06 14:37:27 UTC

Let's see...

1. People (foot) land badly all the time.

2. Wheels probably won't help you in a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place and DEFINITELY won't help you in a field of seven foot high corn.

Conclusion...

If people regularly land in narrow dry riverbeds with large rocks strewn all over the place and fields of seven foot high corn you can count on a fair chunk of them being seriously injured. (That DOES seem to be supported by the data.)

Therefore...

People should not attempt to land in narrow dry riverbeds with large rocks strewn all over the place and fields of seven foot high corn. Works for me.
http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=27170
An X/C Landing Analysis
Jack Barth - 2012/09/20 15:12:55 UTC

Oops, broken ankle 2012/09/19. Motto: Don't land in rocky riverbeds.
-
H4 (1979)
Lake Elsinore
U2 160
miguel
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Re: landing

Post by miguel »

Tad Eareckson wrote:
Well... I could raise the stakes by putting up a pic of my broken femur and the rod inside. I have the full size radiographs.
It wasn't taken shortly after a botched wheel landing.
An unplanned landing with cell phone in thigh pocket.
...is chemise.
Tad wrote:Chamise - Adenostoma fasciculatum.
http://bigcreek.ucnrs.org/fire/fire6/small%20chemise%20regrowth%20in%20fireline%209-26-01.jpg
Image
Here the chemise plants (Adenostoma fasciculatum) are resprouting into the fire line. 9-26-01
http://bigcreek.ucnrs.org/fire/fire6/index.html

straight from the page, about halfway down :lol:
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Tad Eareckson
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Re: landing

Post by Tad Eareckson »

An unplanned landing with cell phone in thigh pocket.
1. An unplanned standup landing attempt with cell phone in thigh pocket.
2. Gee, and here I was thinking those things just caused head-on automobile collisions and brain tumors.
straight from the page, about halfway down :lol:
They're wrong. You can't trust everything you read in a book or on the web. (Dennis Pagen and Ryan Voight shoulda made that pretty clear by now.) A chemise is an item of clothing. The pronunciation is identical but it's a different word with a different origin.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chamise
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chemise
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Tad Eareckson
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Re: landing

Post by Tad Eareckson »

http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=27187
An X/C Landing Analysis
NMERider - 2012/09/20 15:31:48 UTC

Had I followed my own (and a many old school pilots') advice and landed uphill rather than into the prevailing wind, everything would have been fine.
Hard to fuck up an uphill landing - no matter what the wind is doing.

At Woodstock if you turn onto final low over the trees, precisely the way Jesse DOESN'T here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeLWpsgx8IE


and slip or dive in after you clear them you're looking up at the LZ and there's just about nothing that can happen to ruin your day from that point on. The biggest problem you have then is somewhat long and strenuous climb to the breakdown area.

Nevertheless, thanks in no small part to the excellent instructors at local disposal and their spot landing exercises, we've had people overshoot. One guy clipped the fence to the garden at which the camera is pointing at 3:33 and broke an arm and somebody else bounced off the house, 3:36, without noteworthy consequences.
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Tad Eareckson
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Re: landing

Post by Tad Eareckson »

Hey miguel...

If you go to the home page:

http://bigcreek.ucnrs.org/index.html

you find a link to an article:
Forged by Fire: Lightening and Landscape at Big Sur
What do you suppose it was that was having its weight reduced or brightness increased?
miguel
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Re: landing

Post by miguel »

Tad Eareckson wrote:
An unplanned landing with cell phone in thigh pocket.
An unplanned standup landing attempt with cell phone in thigh pocket.
Nope, curled up into a ball because I knew it was going to hurt. No memory of the actual impact. Came around quickly and noticed cell phone on top of break in leg and frame rail next to cell phone.
Tad wrote:They're wrong. You can't trust everything you read in a book or on the web. (Dennis Pagen and Ryan Voight shoulda made that pretty clear by now.) A chemise is an item of clothing. The pronunciation is identical but it's a different word with a different origin.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chamise
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chemise
Dude, don't you know that if it is on the internets, it has to be true. :mrgreen: I was looking for the pic and that came up with the misspelling. I went with it. I am aware of the correct spelling. I checked after. :roll:
Tad wrote:
Forged by Fire: Lightening and Landscape at Big Sur
What do you suppose it was that was having its weight reduced or brightness increased?
The government out here is just now discovering that the Native Americans had it right with their intentional burnings.
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Tad Eareckson
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Re: landing

Post by Tad Eareckson »

Nope, curled up into a ball because I knew it was going to hurt.
Sounds more like a somewhat planned crash than an unplanned landing.
No memory of the actual impact.
How's the memory of the sequence of events leading up to the actual impact? I never tire of accumulating incident data.
Came around quickly and noticed cell phone on top of break in leg and frame rail next to cell phone.
George Price, one of our club guys, pancaked in on a basetube mounted vario. Very serious and expensive internal abdominal injuries. I think it cost him a spleen. Badly traumatized. End of his flying career.
I think I found out the hard way that skating with a hockey puck in a side pocket or a wallet in a back pocket is a bad idea. Water gets really hard when it's cooled down enough.
The government out here is just now discovering that the Native Americans had it right with their intentional burnings.
It didn't discover that soon enough to do a lot of ecosystems enough good to be worth mentioning.
Steve Davy
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Re: landing

Post by Steve Davy »

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Tad Eareckson
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Re: landing

Post by Tad Eareckson »

How much time do you have?

Back before I really learned to appropriately hate hang gliding culture in general and Highland Aerosports in particular I started noticing that all of their students were constantly discussing and obsessed with judging angles at various stages of their approaches. Despite the fact that I've been really good at short runway landings since 1982 on about my fourth mountain flight, it bothered me a bit that I had no clue what they were talking about so at some point I acquired a clue and then told 2003 Instructor of the Year Award winner Sunny Venesky that I didn't think I could pass their Hang Two landing test.

Sunny was surprised and told me I didn't need to worry about the angle thing - that it was just a tool they used guide students in.

Of course what I should have been noticing was that while their students and graduates were reasonably good at hitting a spot in the field at:

38°58'09.16" N 075°52'05.60" W

they were also reasonably good at flying into the taxiway signs, ponds, and soybean and corn fields in the vicinity and that their scrap bin was always bulging with bent and broken aluminum tubing. (While this would be totally unimaginable in REAL aviation in hang gliding it's considered pretty much par for the course.)

So here are the stats on the victim at moment of impact - 2012/06/06, early afternoon...

Paul M. Vernon - 90397 - Hang Two - 2011/05/28, courtesy rat-bastard Adam Elchin - AT FL - 350 flights
- Aeros Discus - Wilmington, Delaware - Age 51

A Hang Three needs ninety flights and ten hours airtime. If he's averaging a minute and forty-three seconds per flight he has the airtime. So how come he doesn't have a Three?

If there's some reason he can't get a Three with that much overkill under his belt then what's he doing flying in an XC comp?

http://ozreport.com/16.114
First accident in eight years of the East Coast Championship
Davis Straub - 2012/06/07 12:14:05 UTC

First accident in eight years of the East Coast Championship
It wasn't an accident - so the record is still unblemished. Incidents with lethal potential, however, are so routine that hardly anyone even bothers mentioning them.
There never has been an accident here (Highland Aerosports, Ridgely, Maryland, USA)
Unless you count stuff like - off the top of my head - Chris McKee taking a dolly for a short flight; Adam Elchin coming down under silk a couple times after totaling at least one glider; Paul Adamez having to leave in an ambulance with a concussion after auguring in; broken arms from Robert Sweeney, Paul Tjaden, and John Simon; and Keavy Nenninger getting killed in a Dragonfly crash.

And we COULD talk about cofounder Chad Elchin dying after his improperly assembled Dragonfly folded up and his improperly mounted parachute tangled but, hell, that was down at Quest.
http://www.wbal.com/article/90730/21/template-story/Hang-Glider-In-Shock-Trauma-

The story below was completely bogus:

http://www.wboc.com/story/18720431/hang-glider-accident-in-caroline-county

The headline in the link to this story was bogus:

http://www.stardem.com/news/local_news/article_562e1c18-b004-11e1-b379-0019bb2963f4.html

I witnessed the poor landing from about 1,500' and a quarter of a mile south of him.
It wasn't a "poor landing", Davis. It was a CRASH - a crash that didn't fall all that short of killing someone.
Image

As you can see from the picture above, Paul Vernon has wheels on his basetube. Those wheels do not do any good in a wheat field.
Yeah, they tend not to do much good unless you get them down on a surface firm enough to get them rolling and spin them for a couple of seconds.
I saw that he came in fast and then suddenly nosed over.

I didn't notice that he didn't move, wasn't concerned that the landing had been that bad, and kept on going another half mile to work zero sink north of a tree line north of him. I came back later to land across the street from him. When I came back I saw that his glider was still nose down and that there were two trucks parked on the highway near him. As I set up the landing the rescue vehicles showed up.

Later a helicopter came in and transported him to the hospital.
Too bad it wasn't a stealth helicopter. Then you wouldn't have had to waste all this time talking about how safe your competitions are and what a stellar job Ridgely does training pilots.
I had heard that he had done a wheel landing at the Ridgely Airpark earlier on his first launch and didn't round out, tried to get up to do a foot landing and landed hard on his wheels.
He was landing at a fucking pancake flat airport with enough nicely mown grass to keep a fair sized buffalo herd happy indefinitely.

If he hadn't been TRYING to get up to do a stupid foot landing and had come in like all the asshole tandem instructors do on EVERY flight he WOULD HAVE rounded out just fine and rolled in soft and smooth on his wheels - just like they do.

The implication being that he did something similar coming down in the wheat field.

If he had stayed prone with his hands on the basetube he coulda maintained good control of the glider, rounded out, flared hard from the basetube a little early, packed up his undamaged glider, gotten a ride back to the airport - 2.6 miles / 4.3 Ridgely runway lengths to the south, and flown the next round.
Sunny talked to him about his landing.
Great. Nothing like an Instructor of the Year telling a Hang Two how to really nail that flare timing.
Obviously wheat is going to grab the base bar and make you nose over, if you don't flare above it.
Yeah, funny nobody ever told him that before.
Gawd I'd love to see archive footage of you on TV with lotsa people talking about what a tragic loss this is to the sport of hang gliding.
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Tad Eareckson
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Re: landing

Post by Tad Eareckson »

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28101
A bird's eye view of the accident at the ECC
Davis Straub - 2012/06/12 12:34:30 UTC

The moving dot (Highland Aerosports, Ridgely, Maryland, USA)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAvvo0VKqg0


I happened to witness Paul's bad landing in the tall wheat field. My GoPro was pointed at him almost the whole time and I caught it on video. He was a long ways away, so he's only a small dot but it does show him stopping abruptly. It also shows him having plenty of other options (including the nice field that I landed in next to the trees).
Paul's only registering about three pixels on this video and it's a bitch to find him and track him. But...

Go full screen and freeze the video at 0:00.

Lined up pretty well with Davis's body - in front / to the upper right of him there's a brown field pattern that looks something like a turtle crawling away in the same direction. Its head is making a dent in the trees and it has a blue collar and a double hump (Bactrian Camel style) at the top of its shell.

Paul's a little white speck that starts out at the top of the forward hump and moves left / southwest / downwind across Oakland Road / MD 312 to over the wheat field and towards a pond inboard of the middle of Davis's port nose wire and located at:

39°00'16.34" N 075°52'30.34" W

0:48 - Emerges from the wheat a bit above the pond.
1:01 - Turns down / east / to his left onto base.
1:04 - Turns north / to his left onto final.
1:31 - Stops, disappears at:

39°00'24.87" N 075°52'24.34" W

End of flight, round, East Coast Championship, 2012 season, almost certainly flying career, and probably life as he knew it. (Probably using one of those salad bowls on a string for a helmet - à la Robin Strid.)

Glider's in perfect shape though. Anybody in the market for a like-new Discus?
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