showing someone (Erika Klein) actually soaring Dockweiler in a Condor - semiprone.
13-094108
15-101816
01-001502
But your response doesn't address the question.
(Although upon review I note we can see Erica grab the basetube with her right hand at 09:33 and stay with it for the second remaining in the sequence. (The u$hPa censor must've blinked at the wrong moment.))
The Dockweiler pics appear to show a very long lz.
Google Earth imagery from a bit under a year ago (2016/10/18) shows about 180 yards from launch to wet sand. In sled conditions you'd need a good launch and glider to be in much danger of getting ankles wet. But, granted, with a higher tide and melting icecaps and glaciers things should be less challenging.
A buffed 19 year old could go prone and unprone quickly, then land.
- Tell me why anybody NEEDS to go upright at Dockweiler - or Kagel or Crestline?
- How does age and buffness enter into the transitions equations? Or anything else in fundamental hang gliding functions?
video as a yardstick for typical Dockweiler "training" flights - fourteen seconds.
- Christopher (LeFay) demands that we stay upright five seconds at the beginning of the flight. Let's give him the two seconds beyond which common sense foot launchers tend to go into flying mode (i.e. immediately upon getting airborne). Do the math for the window for transitioning back to upright and into narrow-dry-riverbed-with-large-rocks-strewn-all-over-the-place mode. How demanding is that?
- I'd call ten seconds a generous figure for a typical Kitty Hawk Kites first five-pack dune lesson flight in the early Eighties. It's about what I did for mine and "taught" later. No half decent students had problems with that window for the upright-to-prone-to-upright SOP we taught.
The rest of us would stay upright...
Undoubtedly. And being upright approaching the Kagel LZ was undoubtedly what got Jeff Craig and Richard Seymour killed in its near vicinity within two months of each other back in 2008. (2008/04/29 and 2008/06/21 respectively.)
We don't need to be teaching anybody how to fly and land upright - because gliders aren't certified to and can't safely be flown and landed upright. We need to be teaching people how to fly, turn, control gliders prone so they're capable of approaching and landing in the Happy Acres putting greens for which everybody's shooting.
And if we can't teach them to fly, turn, control gliders prone well enough to be capable of approaching and landing in the primary Happy Acres putting greens for which everybody's shooting there's no way in hell we can teach them to safely land in primaries - times fifty in the Plan B narrow dry riverbeds with large rocks strewn all over the place.
Jonathan's about the only person on the planet who does the kind of flying that necessitates landing in narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place. And he advises everybody not to do what he does. It's Five Level flying and judgment and he's really good at it and has nevertheless broken bones doing it on more than one occasion.
If we're gonna push Zeroes into Five/Jonathan level XC prep why don't we also start pushing them into Five/Ryan level aerobatics? There's tons of Four level loopers who've never suffered a scraped knee for it and are never likely to. It's something that CAN BE done safely consistently and the skills you develop and use are just extensions of what you develop and use to get into a tight field.
And those are also the skills Ron Keinan needed and didn't have approaching a field on 2016/09/16 that would have been easily wheel or skid landable if he'd gotten into it. Instead... end of career, permanently vegged.
Got a call from Bob latish yesterday afternoon my time that lasted a couple/three hours. He'd prepared a post for his forum, opted for the call instead, in response my/the first post on this page which he'd misinterpreted as a denigration of Dockweiler as a flying site and - by extension - a denigration of his victory in getting a small chunk of Dockweiler flying out from under u$hPa control.
I explained to him that it most assuredly was not - it was a denigration of what US hang gliding in general and Windsports in particular defines as hang gliding. And then we went on mostly to the u$hPa monopoly control issue which I'll probably comment on elsewhere. But for the moment, further thoughts on this upright "flying" insanity that's spun to hitherto unfathomable levels courtesy of the Grebloville monopoly power center...
---
There's only one threat to hang glider pilots that requires a skilled and precise response so obviously it's the only thing which we should prepare for and bulletproof ourselves against and we need to start on Day One, Flight One and only stop after we have it mastered - which will always be never.
We will one day, highly likely in the earliest stages of our high flying career, find ourselves hopelessly out of range of the primary Happy Acres putting green. This will most likely be 'cause we've overshot it 'cause landing a hang glider anywhere in the downwind half of the runway is not an option due to the near certainty of a catastrophic clipping of the downwind end fence for anyone arrogant and foolish enough to try. (Just look what happened to John Simon with that Ridgely taxiway sign ferchrisake. If this (two broken arms) happens to a carrier and hot glider comp pilot who did virtually nothing wrong in the course of his very conservative Industry Standard approach at a wide open general aviation airport in near dead air what hope do any of us mere muppets have?)
Our only sane remaining landing option will then be the one fifty foot diameter clear spot in the designated narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place EXCEPT for this one fifty foot diameter clear spot. Don't worry, all narrow dry riverbeds with large rocks otherwise strewn all over the place will have one available. And of course all primary Happy Acres putting greens will have a standard narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place within safe range of wherever you will happen to be after having catastrophically fucked up your approach. (I checked to make sure.)
Strong crosswinds, wind shadows, gradients, turbulence, rotors, thermal break-offs, dust devils are strictly prohibited from all primary Happy Acres putting greens and their designated narrow-dry-riverbed-with-large-rocks-strewn-all-over-the-place bail-outs so one needn't be concerned about staying prone for a rather negligible bit of extra speed. Plus you get much better roll control authority and leverage upright with your center of gravity lower and your hands high on the downtubes anyway. Everybody knows that.
Furthermore, you'll never need to do any tight, low turn maneuvering to line yourselves up for the sweet spots. If that were an actual concern, dontchya think we'd have trained you for those already? See anything in the ratings requirements? Toldyaso.
And don't worry about fucking up your execution and fatally smashing your head into one of those large rocks just outside your clear fifty foot diameter - the way Jeff Craig did. You're gonna be able to pull this off with the same flawless precision you always have at the training hill and old Frisbee in the middle of your primary Happy Acres putting green.
(Even though you've just totally missed the entire fucking primary Happy Acres putting green in the glassy smooth conditions in which you're now operating. (Pay no attention to those men behind the curtain.)
All those men behind the curtain had the same training, passed the same flying rating tests, consistently nailed the same spots, demonstrated the same flare timing perfection you did and racked up a lot more high flights, airtime, approaches, landings than you have. And the last two of them were very seriously injured and probably and definitely permanently out of the sport respectively. So if you're confident you're gonna continue doing approaches and landings the same way they were and keep getting much better results then good freakin' luck.
So after - let's call it - four decades of reasonably modern hang gliding history, do we have THE SLIGHTEST so much as ANECDOTAL evidence that this classic outlanding scenario is a significantly more serious issue than snakebite and that this emergency landing training is of any significant value in addressing it?
Back in the Dark Ages before Tim Herr told u$hPa that it couldn't even give any appearance of being in the hang gliding safety business and we had some level of conscientious crash reporting and data analysis did Doug Hildreth ever cite a single serious injun country outlanding incident and advise that we needed to tighten our spot landing requirements and flare timing perfection programs? And note that Jesse Fulkersin - Four rated for six years and with RLF TUR XC signoffs and a Mentor appointment - bought it at the Hyner LZ ten days shy of two years ago after a sled run the discussion was all about how the 250 plus foot wide runway slot was too dangerously narrow (for his thirty plus foot glider wingspan). But don't worry New Two Guys, you're good to go for those narrow-dry-riverbed-with-large-rocks-strewn-all-over-the-place bailouts. There's our smoking gun if ever there was one. (Owe ya one, Jesse.)
So does anyone wonder what we're NOT training for while we're spending 99 plus percent of our time and energy practicing upright flying, spot landings, perfectly timed flares? Could flying prone at speed, tight low turn maneuvering, climbing efficiently in light or tight thermal lift, max distance gliding, short field runway skills be of any practical use in preventing and/or dealing with emergency situations? Learning how to make the glider do what you want it to and what that should be? Just kidding, we'd start killing people left and right if we tried to make skilled and competent pilots out of them. And what we're doing now has such a long track record.
A few years back, I saw someone actually soar Dockweiler in the Condor...
But your response doesn't address the question.
Pruning my words to fit your agenda
You should be a political hack. Either party could use you.
The pruned quote:
Tad Eareckson wrote:
A few years back, I saw someone actually soar Dockweiler in the Condor...
The actual quote:
miguel wrote:A few years back, I saw someone actually soar Dockweiler in the Condor. The pilot was proned out, soaring the the 'ridge'.
You can google.com/maps all you want. I have been to Dockweiler numerous times, in person. The distance from launch to a reasonable cushion away from the tideline to land is too short to warrant going prone, especially for older folks.
No, truncating a quote of a passage in your post to save bandwidth.
- Your words are totally unpruned a bit over half a 13 inch MacBook Pro Retina screen above for anybody who gives enough of a rat's ass to go to the trouble of rotating his eyes ten degrees upwards.
- We probably don't have anybody registered on and/or interested in Kite Strings too lazy and stupid to follow an exchange of this depth - and fuck everybody else.
- My twisted agenda is to get people flying in the only configuration in which they can effect the glider's certified control range and performance. (And that happily also happens to be the configuration in which they tend to best survive crash situations.)
You should be a political hack. Either party could use you.
We have THREE parties now.
The actual quote:
We know what the actual quote was.
miguel wrote:A few years back, I saw someone actually soar Dockweiler in the Condor. The pilot was proned out, soaring the 'ridge'.
I got that the pilot was proned out. But we STILL don't know where his hands were.
You can google.com/maps all you want.
I don't WANT to do that AT ALL. But that's ALL I have available to me living where I do near the opposite edge of the continent.
I have been to Dockweiler numerous times, in person.
Versus my zero times.
The distance from launch to a reasonable cushion away from the tideline to land is too short to warrant going prone, especially for older folks.
- Fuck older folks. I'm only concerned with the new students getting their brains rotted by Team Greblo. (Yes, older folks COULD BE new students - but they're not.)
- Bullshit. ANYONE can EASILY go prone within three seconds of getting airborne. And anybody who CAN'T has absolutely no business trying to fly these things. And all of the guys with whom I'm concerned are flying with big wheels and are gonna be a lot better off landing on them. (And the fuckin' older folk are welcome to do whatever the fuck they feel like.)
- I've seen and experienced plenty of launches - from Jockey's Ridge to High Rock, McConnellsburg, Woodstock, Henson Gap - in which failure to go prone and start flying the glider IMMEDIATELY upon getting airborne will result in one going home in a body bag. How come none of these Grebloville douchebags recognize that as a potentially useful "skill"?
- What's one supposed to be learning, getting better at, having fun with in running the glider into the air, dangling upright in the harness, sledding straight out, flaring to a stop a reasonable cushion away from the tideline? New students or older folks? (Guess it would be totally insane to practice anything resembling a turn there 'cause hang gliders can't be safely turned below two hundred feet and you're only permitted a max of sixty.)
But maybe your goal is this:
Fuck no! There are plenty of ways to commit suicide without taking a perfectly good glider with you. (Girlfriend must've just told him they should start seeing other people.)
heartbreaking incident at Torrey. (Got that video back after the GoPro washed up on the beach about ten miles south of Tijuana three weeks later. (No traces of the tandem instructor or student of a varying age were ever found (by anyone but sharks maybe).))
Check your inbox. (Nothing to do with this thread.)
birukobu - 2017/10/03 06:44:19 UTC
That is better:
Holy shit!
I, of course, didn't know how that one was gonna end. But as I was watching it I was being nonstop amazed at how hard that guy was working his ass off to stay out of the lift band and keep his glider from blasting upwards.
I don't know where that was but if it had been on either our Atlantic or Pacific coast with that much wind there'd have been major surf and he'd have been so totally dead.
He was in WAY over his head - figuratively. Good thing not literally.
OK, now somebody tell me how much better off he'd have been upright with his hands on the control tubes - as that would've made it difficult or impossible to stay in front of the lift band.
TheFjordflier - 2017/10/03 14:11:00 UTC
When the l/h wingtip hit the water, he lost all his options to get closer to land.
I'd say by 1:40 he'd lost all his options to safely land anywhere.
Ya know the way after a few dozen people get mown down by somebody with an assault rifle and a packload of clips the response from the Second Amendment crowd is always, "This is not the time to discuss gun control. This is the time to have a moment of silence to (pretend to) show our respect for the victims and their families."?
Proned out means pilot is horizontal with hands on the control bar.
It did when I was teaching people how to fly hang gliders at Jockey's Ridge in '80 and '82 - when you could qualify for unsupervised mountain flight with two hours of flying the glider in certified configuration and upright was limited to five seconds per flight, two at the beginning, three at the end.
Now with total fucking douchebags like Joe Greblo not permitting their victims to touch the CONTROL bar during "flights" from two thousand foot launches and requiring forty hours minimum for a Three the term seems more ambiguous and in need of clarification.
Maybe proned out is west coast slang.
Like hang and hook-in checks being synonyms. But why limit that to the west coast?
These are my final words on the subject.
Well...
miguel - 2012/04/23 22:28:32 UTC
No more response from me on this issue
miguel - 2012/05/23 18:48:46 UTC
I will argue for developement of both upright and prone flight and landing skills until you ban me or until someone takes my keyboard away.
If by "the subject" you mean the definition of "proned out" - I'm fine with that. But we're in a sport in which people hook up with three-point bridals and weak links brake when the towline pressure becomes high enough for the glider to be able to get in trouble. So we hafta go to extra trouble to make sure things are really clear to everyone.
But I have are some additional words from me on the subject control authority in stunt landing versus certified flying mode.
The pigfuckers running this sport get their rocks off by preventing their "students" from learning to safely fly and land and make towing as dangerous as they can get away with doing. That way they can charge their "students" twenty times as much for lessons; keep them in constant states of fear, dependency, low self-esteem; pass themselves off as all-knowing Gods.
If gliders could pass HGMA certification with the "pilot" upright on the downtubes at all times one could attempt an argument that stunt landing configuration was reasonably safe. But:
- They can't be - it's a physical impossibility.
- Even if they could be... Mike Meier told us up front (in a circa 1980 article I haven't been able to find so far) that HGMA standards are largely just arbitrary semi-bullshit. They're hoops through which any reasonably well designed hang glider should be able to jump and time has shown with proper pilot skills and reasonable judgment we can launch, fly, land safely - IN...
I can't control the glider in strong air with my hands at shoulder or ear height and I'd rather land on my belly with my hands on the basetube than get turned downwind.
...CERTIFIED CONFIGURATION. (And it also now occurs to me that the performance tests are and must be conducted and passed in smooth air only. (You can't count getting knocked on your ear by a thermal blast as roll authority/responsiveness.))
But any aircraft has a limit for conditions beyond which it will be overwhelmed and hang gliders tend to really suck in comparison to FAA certified stuff. Our roll control authority is crap through most of our normal speed range, our Vne is below the stall speed of tons of conventional planes, and we're gonna tumble after severe stalls 'cause we ain't got no tails.
So until we can do roll reversals as fast or faster and have as good or better speed ranges and stall recovery performance in stunt landing configuration as we do prone please don't waste anybody's time talking about the superiority of upright for anything but landing in shit in which only people who are either extremely good and in benign air or extremely stupid and incompetent ever end up.
And show me some pictures of anybody doing any really demanding and/or competitive flying in anything other than prone, both hands in proper placement on the control bar.
Aerobatics, dune, thermalling, turbulence, tight approach, name it.
Short story. ANYTHING you do to limit/compromise control WILL crash and kill more gliders over time. And if you REALLY wanna jack up your figures concentrate those compromises when the glider's close to the surface. (And then of course one can go totally nuts by including a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place, preferably in turbulence, in one's definition of a surface.)
We're re-working the accident reporting system, but again it's a matter of getting the reports submitted and having a volunteer willing to do the detail work necessary to get them posted. There are also numerous legal issues associated with accident reports, which we're still wrestling with. It's a trade-off between informing our members so they can avoid those kinds of accidents in the future, and exposing ourselves to even more lawsuits by giving plaintiff's attorneys more ammunition to shoot at us.
Imagine a report that concludes, "If we'd had a procedure "x" in place, then it would have probably prevented this accident. And we're going to put that procedure in place at the next BOD meeting." Good info, and what we want to be able to convey. But what comes out at trial is, "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, my client suffered injury because USHPA knew or should have known that a safety procedure was not in place, and was therefore negligent and at fault." We're constantly walking this line between full disclosure and handing out nooses at the hangmen's convention.
No fuckin' brainer, Mark. Who in his right mind would be handing out nooses at the hangmen's convention when his own neck would be the only possible candidate? It's not like the hangmen are gonna string up the chick in the wheelchair or the parents of the deceased eleven year old tandem hang gliding student, right?
And if you're constantly walking the line between full disclosure and corporate suicide (funny you don't say anything about partial disclosure (in which you present half-truths for the purpose of deception)) surely you can cite an incident or two in which you informed your members so they could avoid those kinds of accidents in the future - and maybe a few in the past as well.
Obviously you HAVEN'T - EVER. 'Cause after full disclosure there's no longer any point in suppressing information about remedial procedures and EVERY motivation for really aggressively getting Procedure X in place - BRUTALLY. Pull the ratings of anybody who even THINKS of being clipped into a glider in the launch line without a helmet buckled on and permanently expel him from the Association.
So you're OBVIOUSLY LYING.
Imagine a report that concludes, "If we'd had a procedure "x" in place, then it would have probably prevented this accident.
Guess we'll have to - seeing as how there isn't a single real life example you can cite anywhere back to the early Seventies.
And Procedure X will, of course, be something that nobody on the planet ever thought of before - undoubtedly 'cause nothing like this totally unforeseeable accident had ever happened anywhere before - and the solution will be something that only the u$hPa Board will be able to come up with. It's not like this would be or ever would've been within the grasp of any other national organizations, flight parks, clubs, instructors, individual recreational pilots. Also nothing like anything ever documented in fourteen years of Doug Hildreth reports and articles.
I understand the interest in learning the cause of this, but could we please not speculate on the forum? We have a very experienced tow administrator (Mitch Shipley) headed to Las Vegas to do an accident investigation, and when we learn what really happened we'll convey that information to our members. He'll be working with two of the local instructors there to get to the truth.
Meanwhile, please refrain from offering speculation or opinion on what might have happened, what might have been theoretically done to prevent it and so on. Emotions are raw, people are hurting, and uninformed speculation doesn't help anybody. News reports are of little use since they're written by people who have no idea how our sport works or what is typical.
Thanks for your understanding and patience.
Terry Strahl - 2015/03/31 00:01:35 UTC
Ok, then vote to bury. Then when you are done with that let's stop every other member of this forum from posting anything related to an accident period without all the facts.
Never mind the chance to open dialog about safety and better ways to address them.
I give up ...
Yes, please bury this topic.
How many lessons learned or follow up official reports have you seen on this site?
No wonder a lot of pilots have given up on posting. Yes they all still lurk ...
Please Vote to Bury away ... nothing to see here, folks. Places head back in sand.
zamuro - 2015/03/31 01:59:00 UTC
Maybe it's only me but I feel that I can do a reasonable job at forming my own opinion about what happened based on available facts and the overall discussion. This includes filtering out whacky ideas but I don't mind seeing them if the alternative is not getting any fact or hypothesis at all.
It seems that facts need not to be public for legal* or other reasons so it always going to be speculation based on the few facts available. Even the ones doing the investigation may have an incomplete list of facts so the best they could do is to give a best (speculation) case scenario.
* It is also hard for me to understand why anything posted in this forum in particular would have any legal consequence if you can always say that it was some non-official random BS posted by an anonymous user. I am not a lawyer though.
Mark G. Forbes - 2015/03/31 03:10:32 UTC
I'm not either, so I rely on the advice I get from people who are. Based on our past experience, comments in club forums and venues like this one can and will be cited in court. As an example, a comment as innocuous as "Let's all keep an eye out for each other out there" was used to argue that every pilot present at a launch site had a duty to prevent a launched-unhooked fatal accident. The pilots at the site didn't know that the pilot in question was intent on launching; they thought he was just walking over to the ramp to line up first. And then he ran off the ramp, the glider flew away and he didn't. And then we got sued.
I ask because I've seen what's happened in the past. Things we post in public forums can have consequences, and I'm trying to give you some context so you understand what's at stake. Please consider that when posting.
Mark?
What good does constantly walking this line between full disclosure and handing out nooses at the hangmen's convention do if rank and file muppets are gonna blab Procedure X all over the fuckin' Jack Show? And you ya just gonna allow some Jack Show muppet to blab Procedure X...
Amazing how when this topic comes up every time you see people argue the same arguments over and over again. It has been a classic (although niche) endless Internet flame topic.
I suspect that some of the parties that have posted in threads like these before are refraining now since they have learned that it is nearly (completely?) impossible to change people's minds on the topic.
For my part I will just refer you to the classic Tad Eareckson essay which I call "the gun is always loaded" which is a bit overworked but probably all you will ever need to read regarding FTHI. A lot of people will find it gores their particular sacred Ox, but I have never seen anyone point out a flaw in his logic.
...all over the fuckin' Jack Show while the Board is doing all that constantly line walking and do shit about it? Tell me why you sleazy goddam motherfuckers wouldn't do everything within your power and imagination to silence and discredit such a muppet.
And what about any instructor who might have been teaching Procedure X all along or decide to teach and advocate it following a high profile relevant splattering? Gonna honor him next round with a u$hPa NAA Safety Award and feature him in a fourteen page magazine article?
Boy do things start falling into place and making sense when you start looking into the depths of the lies and checking for the contradictions.
EVERY SINGLE THING we do at Kite Strings to get any kind of fix in place is a threat to u$hPa. Ditto for any instructor or even any Regular Joe Hang Three who's teaching, advocating, publicly doing anything above a Least Common Denominator. The Least Common Denominator is u$hPa's Gold Standard and it's goal is to get everybody and his dog down to Greblo/Denevan/Taber/Voight/Rooney level then move things down a notch or two for good measure. Somebody explain to me how this model could POSSIBLY be any different. Or show me ONE example that doesn't adhere reasonably well to it.
Being that John was still very new to flying in the prone position, I believe that he was likely not shifting his weight, but simply turning his body in the direction he wanted to turn.
The problem's obviously not that he couldn't fly prone and should've been taught to before being cleared to fly the mountain. The problem was that he should've been flying upright which was a much more appropriate mode for his rating.
I'm not saying that you've claimed that a stronger weaklink allows for a greater AOA... I'm telling you that it does.
You know this.
I'll spell it out anyway...
Increases in AOA increase the load factor... push it beyond what the weaklink can stand and *POP*, you're off tow.
Increase the load factor that the weaklink can withstand and you increase the achievable AOA.
This ain't truck towing. There is no pressure limiting mechanism. Push out and you load the line. Push out hard and you'll break the weaklink... that's the whole idea.
You want to break off the towline? Push out... push out hard... it will break.
As others have pointed out, they've used this fact intentionally to get off tow. It works.
You want MORE.
I want you to have less.
This is the fundamental disagreement.
You're afraid of breaking off with a high AOA? Good... tow with a WEAKER weaklink... you won't be able to achieve a high AOA. Problem solved.
I'm sorry that you don't like that the tug pilot has the last word... but tough titties.
Don't like it?
Don't ask me to tow you.
Go troll somewhere else buddy.
I'm over this.
Zack Marzec didn't die 'cause his Rooney Link increased the safety of the towing operation at the worst possible time, when he was climbing hard in a near stall situation. He died 'cause his Rooney Link was too strong and didn't increase the safety of the towing operation soon enough when he was climbing less hard in a farther stall situation.
Zack C - 2012/06/02 02:20:45 UTC
I just cannot fathom how our sport can be so screwed up.
No surprises left for us. We can only hope to see the most deserving motherfuckers getting permanently smashed out of this sport.
