Kite Strings

Why don't the glider manufactures offer a release option built into the design?

With the incredible technological advances we've seen in gliders, harnesses, instruments, and parachutes we've seen over the decades it's absolutely astonishing that the 2011 "best release in the industry" is a dangerous piece of junk in comparison to the 1991 best release in the industry.

It's astonishing and scandalous that the glider manufacturers aren't building releases into the gliders - like sailplane manufacturers have done since the beginning of time and similar to what was being done with hang gliders in the Seventies. It's almost like there's a spoken or understood arrangement with the Flight Park Mafia...

"We'll sell YOUR gliders and OUR releases - and nobody gets hurt (more than a few times a year)."

Rob Kells saw and liked my stuff and I invited him to steal my design and build it into all their gliders. Couldn't get him to do it.

He himself flew with a one point bent pin release of his own fabrication and toured the country with a rack of Wallaby Releases to put on his demos.

http://ozreport.com/pub/fingerlakesaccident.shtml

http://ozreport.com/pub/images/fingerlakesaccident2.jpg
http://ozreport.com/pub/images/fingerlakesaccident3.jpg


Cost him a few bucks on that one but seven weeks later when I last saw him I had to scrape a Wallaby off the U2 160 I took for a spin at Manquin. And I'm sure he died not having any more of a clue what a weak link was than he did when he wrote the report on the 1985/07/17 Chris Bulger fatality.

I'm hoping that we can get enough momentum going here to seriously approach Steve Pearson on this issue. Bill Moyes might be a good avenue too - seems to understand that you need two hands to fly a glider - but he's got a rather spotty record on towing as well (which is kinda ironic considering that he and Bill Bennett were the primary two guys who introduced hang gliding to the world via towing).

It's becoming clear to me now why Wills Wing wants nothing to do with tow operations. It's a lose lose proposition for them. If I were them I'd want nothing to do with these clowns.

But they DO have TONS to do with these clowns.

- Flight park operations are Wills Wing dealers.

- They demo their gliders at flight parks. Helluva lot easier, more efficient, more effective than trying to demo them at mountains where - barring top landings - every flight translates to a setup, breakdown, and shuttle.

- They advertise their gliders based upon comp results - and comps are overwhelmingly aerotow launched.

- And they wouldn't be selling a lot of gliders to people in the Florida, Texas, and the midwest without these operations.

Hang gliders may owe the bulk of their beginning boom to four-to-one toys used for having spot landing contests at the bottoms of 150 foot hills but that was a very unfortunate historical anomaly. By the end of the Seventies hang gliders had become - but, to this day, have never been recognized as - a flavor of sailplane with a different control system that COULD be foot launched from slopes (and foot landed in very dangerous terrain using a very dangerous technique).

I like most of what I know about the Wills Wing crew - including the late Rob Kells - but they've got blood on their hands with respect to towing, landing, and the hook-in issue.

A lot of damage was just done to those clowns by just two people posting on The Davis Show - Zack and someone with the same first name as yours. (Is there the slightest chance that Ridgerodent and Nobody have the same USHGA membership number?) Do you have any idea how screwed The Evildoers would be if Wills Wing, instead of its idiot recommendation to use "an appropriate weak link" SPECIFIED what "an appropriate weak link" WAS for the particular glider? Like the sailplane manufacturers do in REAL aviation?

There's probably some limit to the number and variety of hang gliding professionals Rooney and his fellow cult members can say are full of shit without at least a few people beginning to wonder a bit if he himself is not full of shit.

So Steve and Mike... How 'bout making inserts for Tost weak link assemblies which put all of your gliders at 1.4 Gs at their max flying weights and/or SPECIFYING 1.4?

But maybe the fact that in twenty years of One-Size-Fits-All, Six-Gliders-In-A-Row, 130 Pound Greenspot Hell you've said ABSOLUTELY NOTHING means you're either too incompetent to understand the issue or corrupt enough to let this carnage continue 'cause you're afraid all your Flight Park Mafia dealers will start pushing Aeros if you embarrass them in an effort to make things safer for your end users - the PILOTS who are buying and flying these things.

And then there's the downtube sales income to consider. That might also explain why there are no references to wheel landings in any of your owner's manuals.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8306258400/


Almost all of this can be carved out of a few chunks of aluminum. Can you/we come up with something practical that Wills Wing could at least take a look at? I got lots of free time and can afford to get a prototype built if you would be willing to test it on your rig.

(Is there the slightest chance that Ridgerodent and Nobody have the same USHGA membership number?)

I don't know how that happened, must be a mix up with USHGA. Steve is my other brother.

So here is my design idea, tell me what you think.
Let's start with a one inch diameter aluminum rod, six inches long. Drill a hole on each end perpendicular to its length. One hole for attaching to the glider the other for the bungee.

Next, install a two inch long barrel over this rod. Now just to carve away some material on the bottom of the rod to accept the line and drill one more hole for the straight pin.

It's just a straight pin barrel release but it releases out the bottom, not out the front.

Also the pin could be shaped like a "P" instead of an "i".

Would be nice if a 2 to 1 was not needed but if it was it could be installed in the down tube just like Wills 12 to 1.

How 'bout forged out of stainless steel?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8305428629/


That's not a bad AT release IF you use it with leechline lanyard, the way it's intended to be, instead of butchering it for and with a bunch of cable crap and use a weak link with an appropriate sized loop. Something like that trimmed down to handle just a four or five hundred pound direct load and with the gate simplified to eliminate the reverse taper which killed Robin Strid and the end smoothed out so's it wouldn't chew up weak links could be pretty good.

Yeah, I'd be happy to work with you on something and test it. But Wills Wing oughta be looking at what I've got now and thinking about implementing it. (Rob saw my stuff an was impressed but wouldn't go with it.)

Even if they just duplicated what they're using for the starboard side VG system, put it on the port as an actuation system, and threw on an unmodified spinnaker shackle just like I did they'd be light years ahead of all this Wallaby, Quest, Lookout slap-on cable crap.

Oops, you've gotten ahead of me. I need to knock off and get under the covers for a while. I'll get back to you on your proposal. Say hi to Other Steve and thank him for chopping up all those Davis Show idiots and scumbags for me.

OK, before I comment on your aluminum rod idea, lemme give you some of the history of the evolution of my remote barrel.

1991/08/02-04, a bunch of us locals went down to Currituck to pick up that stop on the Dragonfly promo tour. That was about the most fun I ever had with a glider, I loved everyone and had great hopes for the future, and never in a million years would've believed that what I was seeing were the seeds of an organized crime syndicate and of the destruction of nearly any hope for even holding aerotowing up to the level of safety we had those three days.

We had a cheap panic snap based release:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8319482072/


http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8319484072/

with a cable loop on the basetube that was clunky looking but worked fine and with which I was pretty happy. The secondary release was on the Dragonfly.

I left with one for thirty-five bucks and snooped around horse shops in vain for a couple of years (pre web) looking for a duplicate of the core mechanism so I could make them myself.

In 1994 at Annapolis Performance Sailing I suddenly found myself riveted to a Wichard 2673 spinnaker shackle thinking, "THIS is an AEROTOW RELEASE!!! I don't know exactly how I'm gonna rig it but I'm gonna take it home and figure that out when I get there."

Thought I was the first person to make this discovery but I recently found a record dating back to 1983.

I was, however, IMMEDIATELY not happy with the gate:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8318769461/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8318781297/




http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8318845617/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8318846765/

but, after a lot of experimentation, concluded that one would be OK as long as it was used in a halfway sane configuration.

But, of course, give enough shitheaded glider jockeys enough time and they'll eventually figure out a way to translate ANYTHING to a fatality.

Immediately after the promo tour, Bobby replaced the panic snap with the infinitely more elegant but, in some ways, problematic spinnaker shackle, welded it to a cable assembly, replaced the loop on the basetube with a bicycle brake lever velcroed to the downtube, and established the bent pin "backup" release as the gold standard for all eternity. The result was nothing short of sickening - and that was my immediate reaction the first time I laid eyes on one of the contraptions.

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24846
Is this a joke ?

Jim Rooney - 2011/08/26 08:24:31 UTC

And I'm not so arrogant to think that my precious little ideas are going to magically revolutionise the industry.
There are far smarter people than me working this out.
I know, I've worked with them.
(Bobby's a fucking genius when it comes to this shit... for example.)

Ah... Yeah.

Robin DOES get a lot of credit for killing himself on 2005/01/09 but not much more than the douchebags running and present at that competition - including Bobby - who allowed that configuration to get in line - or the douchebags at Ridgely who continued to allow it to go up the next year. (Just don't bother getting in line with a stronglink 'cause Rooney doesn't want to be on the other end of the rope when someone listening to this drivel smashes in.)

For some years prior to Robin's death I had been trying to think how I could configure a straight pin barrel release for use at the keel. On the shoulder it was simple, light, cheap, efficient, and bulletproof. The thing I couldn't figure was that the barrel needed to be pulled straight back and the lanyard would, of necessity, be coming up to it at a REAL unacceptable angle. But Robin's crash kept bugging me enough that by May of the next year I said "Fuckit, I'm gonna start making something and figure out how to do it in the process."

And that's what I did. And in the process I thought, "Do sailboat people have some sort of device to redirect line tension?" "Well DUH!!!" So I just incorporated a Harken pulley as the foundation of the mechanism. (Gee, just how difficult was THAT?)

(Note... I'm still not pulling STRAIGHT back 'cause there's a parallax issue - and the shorter the assembly the more pronounced it is. I DO lose a little efficiency but it's not that B an Fing D.)

OK, for your mechanism you need to be able to pull the barrel straight back. And you can't just duplicate what's being used for a glider's VG system 'cause that's going to stuff OVER the keel and you need to work UNDER. So you're probably gonna need to incorporate a pulley in the aft end and figure out how to connect to the barrel.

...the other for the bungee.

What bungee?

I have and (found out at the cost of an uncommanded release at an altitude at which it was challenging (but not impossible) to work my way up that I) NEED something besides pin pressure to hold the barrel closed. I solved that problem with a tiny diameter bungee.

You mean something like that?

Or are you talking about the Tensioner going to the nose?

If the latter it's a BAD idea to have ANY elasticity in ANY component between the tug and the glider feeling ANY component of the tow tension. In some of my older photos I DO show a Perlon cord being used for the Tensioner. That wasn't really a detectable problem but I subsequently figured that I should be using leechline and replaced it.

It's just a straight pin barrel release but it releases out the bottom, not out the front.

You CANNOT do that. If the pin isn't allowed to rotate fully you WILL bend it and send the mechanism slamming into the keel.

It's AMAZING how much kick/recoil you get in these mechanisms - even at normal tow tensions. If you ever need to blow a shoulder mounted straight pin barrel while towing one point at something approaching weak link you better be wearing leather gloves and willing to accept a blood blister anyway.

Also, even with your pin free to rotate your - or any - mechanism is gonna recoil into the keel. And the more massive it is the more problematic that is.

Also the pin could be shaped like a "P" instead of an "i".

You could do that but you'd be reducing the efficiency of and increasing the stress on your second class lever by offsetting the load away from the fulcrum (pivot point).

Would be nice if a 2 to 1 was not needed but if it was it could be installed in the down tube just like Wills 12 to 1.

The two to one really isn't "NEEDED" but:

- Extra mechanical advantage is never a disadvantage when the shit hits the fan.

- The cost is only the dollars, weight, and drag of an extra pulley in the airflow.

- That arrangement allows you some slack when separating the downtube and basetube if you're using a basetube bungee like I am (which I don't recommend for anybody nowadays anyway).

You can also pick up cheaper, lighter, cleaner mechanical advantage just by using a longer pin than my off the shelf job.

Summary...

I love people thinking, engineering, coming up with new ideas and a working of your concept could go somewhere. BUT...

It has to be better than the spinnaker shackle and the spinnaker shackle ain't that bad - certainly infinitely better than that abortion Matt shoved down everyone's throat a couple years ago.

In hang gliding everyone's perfectly willing to fork out a thousand bucks for a heavy parachute he's never gonna use and has a pretty fair probability of not being of any use if he does. And I'm guessing that there's probably a lot of tedious hand work involved in the manufacture of one of those jobs.

But nobody wants to spend more than twenty bucks on a release which is a critical control/safety system component that one uses and depends on EVERY FLIGHT...

(So, Chuck... Would you rather take this tow minus your parachute or minus your release? Take your time thinking about it before you give me your final answer.)

...and is VERY likely to spell the difference between life and death in the extremely rare emergency situations that the Flight Park Mafia goons are always gambling will never happen.

If you're spending a lot more on your parachute than you are on your release system you're almost certainly misprioritizing your safety resources.

But you can still get a Lamborghini level release system for probably less than a third of the cost of a new top notch parachute - once production is ramped up.

Anyway that little mechanism of mine...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/8305993207/


is EXTREMELY powerful, efficient, effective, bulletproof and worth paying someone for the couple of hours of handwork it might take to punch one out when things get going.

So keep thinking but always look at the best EXISTING technology, use that as a base for improvement, and be REAL careful about trying to save a few bucks worth of time/labor and/or materials when you're dealing with something this critical.

So how to get something designed, built and tested?
I'm thinking the thing needs to be carved out of aluminum on a CNC mill.
Is that reasonable?