landing

[miguel]

Me? Master landings? Master anything? Nope, I am an eternal student, striving for mastery

[Tad Eareckson]

Then you should've figured out a long time ago that in aviation...
- There's no such thing as mastery.
- Anybody who's striving for it is dangerously delusional.
- Anybody who starts thinking he's achieved it has really crappy prospects for a long career.

My approach evolved along the lines of...

- There's no fuckin' way in hell an asshole like me is ever gonna master anything.

- Therefore I really need to think of ways to maximize the widths of my safety margins to optimize the survival probability for an asshole like me.

That's what these assholes:

http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=26854
Skids vs wheels

Andrew Stakhov - 2012/08/11 13:52:35 UTC

So I just came back from flying in Austria (awesome place btw). Stark difference I noticed is a large chunk of pilots choose to fly with skids instead of wheels. Conversations I had with pilots they say they actually work better in certain situations as they don't get plugged up like smaller wheels. Even larger heavier Atosses were all flying with skids. I was curious why they consistently chose to land on skids on those expensive machines and they were saying that it's just not worth the risk of a mistimed flare or wing hitting the ground... And those are all carbon frames etc.

...are doing.

Compare/Contrast with a real competitor like Lauren:

http://www.chgpa.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3695
good day until the wreck

Lauren Tjaden - 2008/12/31 04:29:12 UTC

very light conditions at quest. me, paul, dustin, carl and jamie were going to fly out and back but not high enough so we flew around the patch. i worked small lift using carl's tips...he is english where conditions are weak, and is 2nd in world.

came in with no wind after an hour and had right wing drop. instead of wrestling gilder straight i tried to flare while desperately trying to straighten.

bad bad whack. horrible pain, i could not move. screaming with pain, literally. took a very long time to get me out and to the hospital. got very good drugs.

turned out to be badly dislocated shoulder. they had to knock me out to put it back in but it was so bad i kept waking up and screaming. finally they got it done but then they had a hard time waking me back up. drugs were so wierd by the end i could not leave for hours, i'd just start bawling for no reason.

am home now. will see ortho in the next few days. hopefully the damn thing will stay in joint so i can skip surgery. much better with the pain now it's back in joint. looking at maybe 6-8 weeks currently.

anyhow will be ok. pretty crappy day and it doesn't do much for the typing either.

[Steve Davy]

Ken is walking, talking and flying. An amazing recovery. He is flying a Falcon 195.

That's great news! I'm glad he is doing well.

[miguel]

Speaking of skids, I watched someone land yawed with the skids. The pilot let go of the control frame and it skidded sideways on the skids as advertised. A wheel might have caught and taken out the downtube. I can see the utility of them, especially on launch.

[Tad Eareckson]

Speaking of Ken Muscio... An amazing recovery from what?

[Steve Davy]

Two broken legs, after a blown launch at Dunlap last September.

[Tad Eareckson]

I've been thinking about starting a "launching" thread - not because it's something we don't know how to do, but to drive a stake through the heart of this bullshit we always hear about slope launching being so much safer than tow launching because there's not all that nasty equipment complexity to deal with.

[miguel]

You would have to have some accurate numbers to compare the two methods of launching.
number of bad outcomes/number of foot launches
number of bad outcomes/number of tows
Those numbers do not exist.
Therefore it would turn into

[Tad Eareckson]

There ARE NO accurate numbers in hang gliding - since the days of Doug Hildreth very much by design.
So the best we can do is use anecdotal evidence, personal experience, estimation, logic, common sense to get good feels for what's going on.
And that all adds up to something magnitudes better than opinion.

[Tad Eareckson]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hhpa/
Houston Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association

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.

http://www.shga.com/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3858
Landing in the Big T wash

NMERider - 2013/04/05 21:09:27 UTC

There have been a number of bad landing incidents in the wash by a variety of experienced pilots because it is a dangerous bailout, period. It is NOT the club's landing zone either. It is a bailout and when it's hot on the surface it can and will bite you in the ass.