landing

[miguel]

A prudent pilot will develop adequate foot landing skills. Prudent pilots do not manufacture excuses for weak flying skills. They go to the training hill and practice the skills until they master them.

[Tad Eareckson]

Name one person who's mastered foot landings.

[miguel]

Ken Muscio

[Tad Eareckson]

So you're saying that once Ken has assessed conditions, determined them to be hang glideable, and committed to aviation it's physically impossible for Mother Nature to throw anything at him which will leave him in the middle of the Happy Acres putting green with his nose firmly planted?

If the answer is yes can you put him in touch with Steve Pearson so Steve can get some tips on...

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27086
Steve Pearson on landings

Steve Pearson - 2012/03/28 23:26:05 UTC

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.

...mastering HIS foot landings?

[miguel]

Well...

I have been watching him land for over 25 years. Nothing but perfect greasers. Even in gusty crosswinds and rotors, which used to be the norm at McClure.

[Tad Eareckson]

Yeah, people who fly their asses off all the time tend to develop some really solid skills and you may hafta watch them for a very long time before you see them:
- get hit at just the wrong time by something nasty enough to significantly derail their plans
- fail to execute perfectly for a given situation
- get trashed by a combination of both of the above

But I seriously doubt that you're gonna hear Ken, or anybody but an extremely stupid Hang 2.1, tell anyone that he's MASTERED foot landings - or anything else in aviation. That would be just begging for a trashed glider, dislocated shoulder, and/or broken neck on the next flight.

A REAL pilot understands that the best he'll ever be able to do is develop judgment and skill to maximize chances for success / minimize risk. And he understands that the judgment is a hundred times more important than the skill 'cause the latter very quickly smacks into a brick wall when the shit hits the fan - there are clearly defined limits to things like reaction time and control authority and the guy with the most righteous stuff on the planet can be reduced to passenger/victim status in a heartbeat.

Zack Marzec discovered that the hard way two months minus an hour ago today. Kinda too bad he wasn't high enough to get a parachute open. It would've been real interesting to see if he'd have continued to be towed like a pro with a Rooney Link on his shoulder.

A prudent pilot will develop adequate foot landing skills.

What are "adequate foot landing skills"? Foot landing skills that allow you to safely land in a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place 99 percent of the time? If you land in a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place a hundred times those skills will not have been adequate and what you accomplished with all the adequate landings won't have been worth it.

Prudent pilots do not manufacture excuses for weak flying skills.

A foot landing isn't a flying skill. It's a stunt landing skill and we've already established that it can't be mastered or even made adequate. The best we can hope for is being able to pull it off or get away with it just about all the time.

They go to the training hill and practice the skills until they master them.

In other words... Stay on the training hill for the rest of your flying career.

- Our flying careers and opportunities to fly have finite limits. Do we wanna spend our days at Elings pretending to "MASTER" our foot landing skills or at Kagel thermalling for three hours and...

http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=27415
Friday the 19th with Hawks & Friends!

NMERider - 2012/10/24 21:47:05 UTC

I have to say that landing on the wheels is so much fun it's not funny.

...rolling it in in primary?

- People get crashed, injured, crippled, killed at training hills mastering their foot landing skills. That focus has robbed a lot of people the opportunity to ever get to Kagel, thermal for three hours, and roll it in in the primary.

[Steve Davy]

Miguel,

How is Ken doing?

[miguel]

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

[miguel]

Yeah, people who fly their asses off all the time tend to develop some really solid skills and you may hafta watch them for a very long time before you see them:

- get hit at just the wrong time by something nasty enough to significantly derail their plans
- fail to execute perfectly for a given situation
- get trashed by a combination of both of the above

But I seriously doubt that you're gonna hear Ken, or anybody but an extremely stupid Hang 2.1, tell anyone that he's MASTERED foot landings - or anything else in aviation. That would be just begging for a trashed glider, dislocated shoulder, and/or broken neck on the next flight......................

[Tad Eareckson]

If you can get Ken - or anybody but an extremely stupid Hang 2.1 - to state that he's mastered foot landings it won't be an opinion. It'll be on the record - the way that Wallaby's on the record stating that:

http://www.wallaby.com/aerotow_primer.php

If you fail to maintain the correct tow position (centered, with the wheels of the tug on the horizon), the weak link will break before you can get into too much trouble.

And we should be able to have a lot of fun with that one too.

P.S. When did you master foot landings?