Saturday, May 26, 2012

On Saturday of this weekend I went out to fly again.

The day looked fantastic with large cumulonimbus clouds popping up all over. The wind was relatively calm too but only a few pilots came out to tow.

I got an early Aerotow on the Falcon to 2100 which let me work lift for 20 minutes or so. I climbed to 3070 and decided I would try to go find another cloud to work lift under. I mean, that's what cross country pilots do right? They fly from cloud to cloud, or anyway, from thermal to thermal and try to get as far as they can. Anyway, I saw a large looking cloud that appeared to be forming over Darbyville, only two miles away. So I headed out of my lift and cruised in that direction. It turns out the cloud was farther than I though, by about 6 miles or so. I kept an eye on my altitude so that I could be sure to get back, but I didn't get any lift at all. I flew back to where I expected it to be but couldn't find the lift I started in. I flew in to land and had a nice strong flare.

The day ended up turning on much more strongly toward 3 in the afternoon. One pilot had a 3 hour flight and climbed to 5000 a few times, so the lift was there. Sometime toward the end of the day, closer to 5:30, I tried taking another flight on my Horizon. I had confidence that I understood what was supposed to happen, what I was supposed to do, and how to adjust for position. But the attempt went very poorly. I nearly crashed again. Immediately after coming out of the cart, the glider started banking, I started making large corrections, and I the pilot induced oscillations escalated. The tug pilot gave me the rope and I tried landing in control. I ended up making the worst whack I've ever had and ended up slightly bending a down tube. Check out the video for a dramatic clip of my mistake.

Immediately after the attempt I had no clue what went wrong. Even after looking at the video I'm only half sure what the cause of the failure was. I think I came out of the cart and was slightly off center, or for some reason, I immediately started making a shift in body weight to the left. And I can see it in the video, but I can't for the life of me remember why I did it. I can't relate what I felt during the attempt with how I reacted. I think this is evidence for me that I need to have a fin, and a lot more VG. Both of those things aught to help lessen the "sensitivity" so to speak of the glider during those crucial moments. I can't start oscillating immediately after coming out of the cart.

Also, I need to drill into my mind that if I should disconnect from the tow line for whatever reason, I should NOT try to recover and flare, I should just set the glider down on it's wheels and roll/slide it out. I think partly the severity of my landing on this failed attempt is due to the fact that I was trying not to land on the wheels and ended up mushing (or stalling) the glider into a flare with tilted wings. I think I can pick out in the video where if I had been thinking better, I would have just belly landed and rolled it out into the soft and tall grass, instead I oscillated, never recovered and half flared while the glider was turning.

I ended up slightly shaken, but without any injury at all. No bruised shoulder where I pushed all my weight into the down tube, no sprained ankle, no scrapes or grass burns (on me anyway, the nose cone has a nice grass stain). It could have been a lot worse.

Go to youtube to watch the video, it doesn't embed very well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k09_cwbH2ps