http://vimeo.com/68791399
Which tells us that never once in their history of twenty billion winch tows at Tres Pinos had any one of these Mission Soaring Center motherfuckers done a release malfunction drill. And from Jim Keen-Intellect Rooney we know:Lin Lyons - 2013/06/20 18:38 UTC
At the top of my flight, I was dragging about a mile of tow line behind me. Harold had released the power to both winch drums, and watched the line scream off both drums at a rate he'd never seen, or heard, before. He was pretty much terrified.
http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=16384
Tow Release Malfunction
So this was inevitable. The three-string is a mechanical thing so there was a one hundred percent certainty that this failure WOULD occur.Jim Rooney - 2010/03/26 20:54:43 UTC
Bent pin releases are indeed very very reliable. But 100%? Nope. It's exceptionally rare, but they jam. All mechanical things do.
If they were perfection, everyone would be using them.
Do they need to see one to anticipate one? How many Quest Link induced dangerous stalls did we hafta watch to predict that one of them would eventually kill a pro toad?Mission Soaring has been around for four decades.
They have never seen an accident like mine.
Why?"I'm really sorry Harold."
Oh, you're the ONLY person to have made THIS:They're redesigning the tow link, even though I'm the only person to have made this mistake.
mistake. In a sport in which we have all kinds of hotshot "pilots", instructors, dealers incapable of reading owners' manuals and "think" that the purpose of the spreader...
19-13501
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3895/14743990195_8b8c2933c2_o.png
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2831/9623912388_98cf582742_o.png
1504
...is to keep the carabiner from being crushed you're the ONLY person to have hooked up a three-string wrong. And you know that because that's what Mission told you. Bullshit.
They're "redesigning" the tow "link" - even though you're the ONLY person to have made this mistake.
http://www.hang-gliding.com
Mission Soaring Center
"Redesigning" meaning hacking out one of the three loops of their state-of-the-art piece of towing equipment to up the state of the art. So isn't that an admission that it wasn't you who was the problem? That the three-string - which has been used essentially without any problems at virtually all truck tow operations on the planet since the beginning of time - was actually dangerous? Apparently it was just too complex a mechanism for them to be able to teach their students how to use safely.Mission Soaring Center - 2015/03/04
Mission Soaring LLC has been serving the Northern California hang gliding community since 1973.
The Mission Soaring Hang Gliding school provides professional training on state-of-the-art equipment at our dedicated training site at Tres Pinos.
So how come they haven't issued an advisory to help ensure the safety of other tow pilots at other operations?
And, anyway, the new state-of-the-art two-string is also a mechanical thing and thus failure is inevitable with it as well. Are we really sure that the new state of the art is better than the old state of the art?