So, I've been putting off writing up my last day of flying. There have been a number of reasons for this but I guess the biggest reason is that it was my worst day of flying ever. How does this sound: I had 2 more blown aerotow launches which resulted in a belly landing once, and a nice controlled flare the second time. I was still making the same mistakes I was on my first few attempts but couldn't figure out quite what the problem was. On my third tow I launched successfully, towed up to 2100 feet and soared for an hour, climbing to cloud base once at 6000 ft AGL. Sound like a bad day so far? Well, I even had a nice landing on that flight.
However, at the very end of the day I decided I didn't want to carry my glider all the way across the field to the hanger where I would be packing up. Instead I took a short scooter tow thinking it would be nice to boat around for a few minutes and land back at the hangar. It really was quite pleasant in the calm air late in the evening. But I was lazy, or not focused on the important things, or tired, or something, and I ended up setting up a poor approach that brought me in a little too high into a restricted landing area. For what ever reason I chose not to use the thousands of feet of runway, and wide open field I had available to me and instead chose to land in a "convenient" spot. As I rounded out my final and was skimming the ground waiting for my glider to loose energy so that I could flare, I realized there was a large wooden pole coming at me surprisingly fast. I don't think there was any chance for me to turn, not when I was going 25 miles an hour and only 2 feet off the ground. I stared at the pole and had some instinct to flare early and try to bring the glider to a stop before I ran into the pole. I flared, and flared hard. But I had just a little too much speed so my flying wire and leading edge made contact with the pole almost at the same time. Immediately after the collision I landed on my feet but was off balance and had no grip on the glider so my left wing tip hit the ground hard and broke the tip wand and bent one baton.
I stepped out of my harness a little shaken and stunned at what just happened. A quick inspection of the glider showed me a bent down-tube, a broken tip wand, a bent baton, a flying wire striped of some of it's plastic coating, a small tear at the seam of the sail right at the leading edge, and worst of all, a large dent in the leading edge tube inside the sail.
Uncharacteristically, I didn't have a camera running. I can't watch or post any video of the accident and no one else saw it.
I made a terrible choice in landing direction. Since there was calm air, I could have landed in any direction at all but I chose pretty much the smallest landing area I could have, even then I came in too high and had too much speed when I rounded out.
This accident was made worse by the fact that in one week, I was planning on driving to Colorado to attend the Villa Grove Fly Week. So the roughly $500 in repairs I would have to make, needed to be done within 5 days if I was going to make it.
Since I'm writing this on Friday, and the accident happened on Saturday of the week before, I can spare you the details of all my stress and worry and frantic preparations. In the end, the people at Northwing Designs were extremely helpful, and did everything they could to rush the parts to me on time. And despite all the things I had going against me (I hadn't built my car roof rack to transport my glider, I still needed to make some car repairs, and I was struggling to find a harness that I could borrow for the week) I have managed to get almost everything taken care of. I have a car that is in good shape for the 2600 mile trip, I have a sturdy roof rack built, I have a harness packed with my new parachute, and I have the replacement glider parts in route.
The only real issue that is still eating me up inside is I have to hope that the parts survived the 3 day shipping. The 108 inch long leading edge is delicate, and I don't seem to have any trouble imagining a fork lift tong puncturing right through it. This evening will determine weather or not I will actually be making a trip to Colorado or not.
