Kite Strings

a hook-in check, and a wheel landing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiguowRGw9I

Two consecutive posts in one topic by two different individuals, neither one of whom is me. A Kite Strings rarity.

I was delighted at just how easy it was to do a lift and tug just prior to launch and verify that my leg loops were attached and the riser connected to the glider.

Helluva lot easier, quicker, more efficient and effective than a goddam Joe Greblo Four or Five Cs Hang Check in the setup area, ain't it?

I also posted a short video of my flight from Tuesday in which I perform a more obvious lift and tug shortly before having a little fun off the ramp.

Must've procrastinated too long. Couldn't find it.

I was task racing on Wednesday and left the camera off to further reduce drag.

Wish people would start reducing drag by taking their totally moronic backup loops off.

I also get more sleep when there's nothing new to edit.

Hits upon the reason I'm perpetually sleep deprived.

a hook-in check, and a wheel landing.

Doin' things right on the two (pretty much only) parts of the flight.

Sorry Jonathan, I liked Allen's landing a whole lot better than yours. I have a pretty significant problem with my lower back that's probably the result of a lifetime of various issues and I'm pretty sure that most always shooting for and occasionally pulling off crisp no steppers was a noteworthy contributor.

Tad Eareckson wrote:Two consecutive posts in one topic by two different individuals, neither one of whom is me. A Kite Strings rarity.

There may be be hope for mankind!

I also posted a short video of my flight from Tuesday in which I perform a more obvious lift and tug shortly before having a little fun off the ramp.

Must've procrastinated too long. Couldn't find it.

It's between the 4 and 7 second mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GF9eOsX2YE If you'd stop wincing and averting your eyes to my now flabby, middle-aged ass you may have caught sight of the leg loops giving me a wedgie. My leg loops were made as tight as possible on this harness and so I barely have to hoist the glider before my 'skid-mark' warning alarm goes off.

Sorry Jonathan, I liked Allen's landing a whole lot better than yours. I have a pretty significant problem with my lower back that's probably the result of a lifetime of various issues and I'm pretty sure that most always shooting for and occasionally pulling off crisp no steppers was a noteworthy contributor.

No offense taken Tad. I am fully in favor of wheel landings and always flying within gliding range of an adequately smooth landing (rolling) surface. I am also opposed to the imbecilic dogma of the mythical superiority and phantasmagorical necessity of no-step landings. I am just as opposed to the {same description] of run-out or moon-walk landings. I now advocate for a spectrum of safe landing technique that suits the pilot and flying conditions which includes anything appropriate to the situation including wheels and whatever style results in freedom from injury to pilot and equipment.

I am an adventure pilot and fly into places where wheels often will not work and landing style can be anything from a full sprint to full air-brake. Style points count for zero in my world. Here's a shitty surface with a nice downhill slope right in the middle followed by a wire fence where I landed on Saturday. The wind gradient went from 15mph to near zero rapidly and was otherwise pretty gusty. But I've landed here before where I had to stay airborne or risk an ugly scene until the thermal and dust devil cycle ended. Most importantly it is a brewery and I'd been in the air over 4 hours on a tough flight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njh3OzPXR-c

It's between the 4 and 7 second mark...

Oh. Yeah, saw that. My rickety brain interpreted:

I also posted a short video of my flight from Tuesday...

as something you'd posted IN ADDITION to that one.

I am an adventure pilot...

So was the guy...

9-24015-6


...under the blanket - and his little skydiving student of a varying age pronounced dead elsewhere. Says so right on the wing.

1-03715-3


"ADVENTURES UNLIMITED" - unless, of course, you really consider the lakebed. (Flip your laptop upside down - makes it easier to read.)

Adventures tend to be really bad undertakings in aviation. Here's what my Mac Dictionary app says about adventure:

adventure |adˈvenCHər, əd-|
noun
an unusual and exciting, typically hazardous, experience or activity: her recent adventures in Italy.
- daring and exciting activity calling for enterprise and enthusiasm: she traveled the world in search of adventure | a sense of adventure.
- archaic - a commercial speculation.
verb [ no obj. ] dated
engage in hazardous and exciting activity, especially the exploration of unknown territory: they had adventured into the forest.
- [ with obj. ] put (something, especially money or one's life) at risk: he adventured $3,000 in the purchase of land.
ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French aventure (noun), aventurer (verb), based on Latin adventurus 'about to happen,' from advenire 'arrive.'

Nothing in there looks like a great idea in hang gliding.

Adventure is dice rolling. "I'm gonna tie my glider to a rope and have a truck on the other end of it pull me up. I COULD use a release that, if anything goes wrong down low, would be of more value to me than my backup loop, weak link, flashlight, banana, and rubber duck but that would cost a couple hundred bucks and I've never had anything go wrong down low before. And my students are coming here looking for unlimited adventures so that's what I'm providing and I don't wanna get fined or sued for false advertising."

Demanding, challenging flying, pushing the envelope a bit... I don't have a problem with that. More power to ya. Using judgment, experience, skills to accomplish flights that Joe Hang Two And A Half probably shouldn't be attempting, keeping the risk down to about...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj1Z_BI5OXs


...the same as the drive from home to launch.

One in a hundred thousand, by the way, still totally sucks. The Kelly/Arys was, I'd say, a well under a one in a hundred thousand event. The Zack Marzec was, quite literally...

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24846
Is this a joke ?

Jim Rooney - 2011/08/25 21:40:25 UTC

Tommy.
First, I sent Steve a bunch of info offline. Hopefully it clears things up a bit for him.
Unfortunately, he's stumbled onto some of Tad's old rantings and got suckered in. So most of this was just the same old story of debunking Tad's lunacy... again .

See, the thing is... "we", the people that work at and run aerotow parks, have a long track record.
This stuff isn't new, and has been slowly refined over decades.
We have done quite literally hundreds of thousands of tows.
We know what we're doing.

Sure "there's always room for improvement", but you have to realize the depth of experience you're dealing with here.
There isn't going to be some "oh gee, why didn't I think of that?" moment. The obvious answers have already been explored... at length.

Anyway...
Weaklink material... exactly what Davis said.

It's no mystery.
It's only a mystery why people choose to reinvent the wheel when we've got a proven system that works.

...a one in hundreds of thousands event. Yet over fucking night every single one of our Aerotow Industry total douchebags stopped talking about their 130 pound Greenspot standard aerotow weak link, long track records, and proven system that works and suddenly became happy with universal Tad-O-Links.

Likewise the chances of skipping the hook-in check AND launching unhooked AND getting killed or seriously fucked up are probably on the order of one in a million.

09-05019
http://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2928/13891086719_3ba7e65d38_o.png


http://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2933/14074543322_a183cc3a23_o.png
10-05124

Still worth it for me to waste all that time and effort doing a hook-in check every flight - even when I'm on a nice soft sand dune with a slope just steep enough to allow me to get airborne.

Style points count for zero in my world.

Yet absolutely everything on the Day One training hill. Go figure.

But I've landed here before where I had to stay airborne or risk an ugly scene until the thermal and dust devil cycle ended.

The conditions which made it dangerous to land were also the conditions which eliminated the necessity to land. Cool how that works out for us sometimes.

Tad Eareckson wrote:Still worth it for me to waste all that time and effort doing a hook-in check every flight - even when I'm on a nice soft sand dune with a slope just steep enough to allow me to get airborne.

Style points count for zero in my world.

Yet absolutely everything on the Day One training hill. Go figure.

But I've landed here before where I had to stay airborne or risk an ugly scene until the thermal and dust devil cycle ended.

The conditions which made it dangerous to land were also the conditions which eliminated the necessity to land. Cool how that works out for us sometimes.

Gosh, I looked up the definition of 'adventure' and got a real surprise. The definition includes the transitive verb: 'venture' as in taking the 'risk' of landing out and maybe not even getting a ride back or safely landing some weird place like 3 miles behind an earthen dam inside a canyon on a dry river wash with assorted rocks and boulders in nil wind. Then finding the only human living back there and getting a ride on his truck all the way out over the dam and out to the rural highway then getting picked up by a friend and returning to the LZ by 6PM. That's more the type of 'adventure' I have in mind. I have a few stories like this and plenty of unedited video.

Yes, that ol' Rob Kells style hook-in check should be a regular habit in every pre-launch situation.

I wish more pilots would understand that 'Style' should not be mistaken for 'Safety' unless of course the pilots wishes to have an 'Adventure'.

And so the risks I take in my type of adventure is that I won't find the lift I need where I'd rather not land but that doesn't mean I can make a safe landing, style be damned. And that landing could be on wheels if I'm using them that day. Depends on my physical condition being that I am a human landing gear.

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42389
Air ambulance

Bille Floyd - 2015/05/08 18:51:32 UTC
Las Vegas

The Heli ride from Jean dry-lake, to Vegas , cost me $12,000 .
I complained to the company that they gave me too much Morphine
and i didn't remember any of it .

They Laughed, as they took my money !!

I'd be dead , if not for them ; woulda bled to death !!

Thanks for confirming what I suspected regarding the site...

http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25550
Failure to hook in.

Bille Floyd - 2011/10/27 16:59:26 UTC

The Wind came back up and i picked up the glider & made a mental pre-launch check. Remembering that i had already hooked in previously --
i deleted the, "lift the glider" part to check for tension on the harness.
and signaled for the driver to GO !!

...at which you didn't get away with your SOP skipping of the SOP.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7588/16793597978_a1e73bd274_o.png

Jump to next post:
http://www.kitestrings.org/post7867.html#p7867

So quite some time ago these two videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ls2QiDtSO7c
Rescue 911-Episode 415 "Hanging Hang Glider (Part 1)"
03:56

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX_6UZ2UWEE
Rescue 911-Episode 415 "Hanging Hang Glider (Part 2)"
07:48

BeatleMoe - 2008/05/14

A hang glidest falls fifty feet into the woods when he didn't hook himself into his kite. This segment of episode 415 aired on February 9, 1993 on CBS.
Vote for Rescue 911 on TV/DVD at the links following the video.
http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/showinfo.cfm?showID=3531
http://www.petitiononline.com/res911/petition.html

went dead. Reenactment of a damn near fatal unhooked launch incident at Sauratown Mountain on 1989/07/30. Jim Brudin is aloft as the incident begins, Gilbert Aldrich, assisted by significant other / future spouse Nancy Lumley, is prepping to nearly kill himself, Doug Rice (signed my Two in April of 1980, worked with him that fall at Kitty Hawk) is bringing up the rear. Joe Greblo does the flying.

Image quality sucks but it's a damn good case study of an unhooked launch incident. Discussed on The Jack Show at:

http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?p=298335
Rescue 911-Episode 415

Fifty still archive. (Second video is mop-up - nothing of importance to the topic.)

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- 01 - chronological order
- -0 - minutes
- 22 - seconds
- 22 - frame (30 fps)

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Jump to top:
http://www.kitestrings.org/post7860.html#p7860

Tad Eareckson wrote:Later in my career I made a rule to always flip a windshield wiper up whenever I had an unstrapped glider on the racks.

Great, now when it starts raining you'll have a scratched windshield and an unstrapped glider.
How about doing a tie-down check just before leaving?

Not focused enough.

Jan from the land of the midnight sun and whose slogan could be, "Fjord has a better idea" recently produce this truly excellent PSA on doing a hook-in check.

http://vimeo.com/124963665