That's the joy of HG - doing this amazing thing that can only previously be done by birds. The joy is not in making rules, collecting points, keeping score, or any of the other inane aspects that turn HG into just another game. That's the part I would want newbies to understand - HG is an amazing experience in itself, and doesn't require it be turned into a "sport".
You forget to mention how empty the experience soon becomes unless we push ourselves going XC to the extent that our only hope of survival is pulling off a spot no-stepper in a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place while things are cooking off. So in order to ensure that our lives are truly meaningful we need to dedicate ninety percent of our training and two thirds of our energy and focus throughout the rest of our flying careers to preparing for that inevitable moment - regardless of how many crashes and broken downtubes and arms it costs us.
P.S. Working with Steve directly to see what the best way of transferring a 90.1 meg file is. If anyone has any good ideas please PM me.
Whack Landing Safety Video:
The pilot here and most of us know why this happened and humas do make mistakes even when we try to be diligent.
I am putting this video on YouTube again to encourage others to NOT make mistakes Hang Gliding.
Or maybe because the "pilot" was finding the social cost of pulling it down was a lot higher than the social cost of leaving it up.
Robert Moore - 2013/06/03 21:57:31 UTC
I guess it illustrates how even traditionally good landers can have an unfocused moment lead to a whack.
That wasn't an unfocused MOMENT.
It also illustrates how wheels won't necessarily prevent such an incident - even on a nicely groomed LZ.
Especially if you've come in determined not to use them. A bit like commenting on how windshield wipers won't necessarily help provide safe visibility in heavy rain if you don't turn them on until you hear gravel under the tires.
piano_man - 2013/06/03 22:27:56 UTC
Georgia
The good & the bad
One thing that stands out to me between the good and the bad landing is this:
he stays on the base-tube through the wind gradient with a good landing;
on the other he goes to his uprights higher up - off the ground - and with his hands pretty high doesn't seem to have the same pitch authority to keep his speed up.
The reason he doesn't SEEM TO is because he DOESN'T. But, hey, this is hang gliding - and you can get into a whole shitload of trouble by stating the obvious.
Nic Welbourn - 2013/06/03 23:43:26 UTC
Canberra
Thanks for posting this again Skydog, it's a good learning tool and a reminder for all of us in our lifelong pursuit to perfect launch and landing.
Yes. Our lifelong PURSUIT. Thanks for confirming that it's nothing we can actually ACHIEVE to the extent that we can make landing on second or third rate terrain a good idea.
snowbird - 2013/06/04 00:26:04 UTC
Florida/North Carolina
After all the back-and-forth, thanks for posting the video Skydog. Always something to learn for all us H-2's!!!
Wanna skip all the bullshit and learn something from a Hang Fifteen?
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.
GroundEffect - 2013/06/04 00:43:57 UTC
Thanks for the video. I think we've seen this type of accident many times.
When it happens many times it really doesn't come anywhere close to be considered an "accident".
Glad he walked away from it. Any chance your friend would consider installing larger wheels and stay on the base tube though the landing.
Fuck no. He's been flying for 38 years and hasn't figured out that you just need to break an arm ONCE to make four decades of perfect standup landings not worth it.
And he didn't NEED larger wheels on that surface. He just needed to come in with the intent of using what he had.
Andy Long - 2013/06/04 00:47:53 UTC
California
Hi Bob,
Thanks for posting the video again. Adding another of your friend's landings certainly adds some perspective.
No. It just adds to four decades worth of data illustrating the obvious.
Proof that we came down kind of hard on your friend. Ah... the internet. It's still just like the Wild West. At least here at The Org, you know your fellow pilots won't pull any punches. Good or bad.
Fuck The Org.
Jim Gaar - 2013/06/04 01:27:56 UTC
Yes, the video demonstrates nothing new. Shots like that are always tough on the ego and pride of a good pilot.
Or somebody like Chris.
Shit does happen
There was no shit "happening" on that one, dude. It was all shit being GENERATED. And anybody who believes that crashes occur because "shit happens" have no fuckin' business flying hang gliders.
Maybe a wake up call? I dunno...
I'da thunk that the Zack Marzec fatality was a really excellent wake-up call. Tell me what changed.
Name me a single wake-up call from the entire history of hang gliding that's ever had a measurable positive effect.
Sure glad it turned out as well as it did.
It was a fuckin' whack with a bent downtube, ferchrisake. Go to the Lookout LZ in no wind during a flush cycle. You'll see a half dozen just like it.
Bruce Parker - 2013/06/04 01:44:52 UTC
Deer Park, Texas
Exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be seen so that others might not have to make the same mistake.
I think a little bit of trashing the pilot is well worth it if it saves someone down the road.
It won't. It was obvious to everyone with a an IQ anywhere in the two or three digit range that he was too slow. But everyone is locked into the standup landing mentality so people are still gonna be flying low and upright with very limited ability to use speed. And whacks and broken arms are still gonna be common as dirt.
Do we always have to learn the hard way. I hope not.
I'd be thrilled beyond my wildest dreams if y'all were capable of learning anything after half a dozen fatalities.
Dave Hopkins - 2013/06/04 02:23:49 UTC
This incident was caused by not following the basics of landing. Hands too high too early causing poor speed control.
Hands anywhere other than the basetube causes shit speed control. Watch some aerobatics pilots if you don't believe me.
I see this often and wonder? What to heck are they thinking.
They're thinking almost entirely about stopping it on their feet and zilch about flying the fuckin' glider.
pulled in until we are through the gradient. let the glider go to TRIM, Hands loose, then move them up to flare.
Carefully avoiding, of course, all the large rocks strewn all over the place in the narrow dry riverbed.
Its easy for young and old alike to make these types of mistakes.
Gawd I wish you'd learn the difference between young and old and inexperienced and experienced. Or is it just that "young" and "old" are easier to spell?
I watched a pilot blow launch here at Ellenville a couple weeks ago. Totally ignoring focusing on the basics of launching > loading the glider , pulling in and moon walking it off. No, instead he let the bar out as soon as it pulled on the harness and kept pushing out until it spun into the rocks.
Was he launching off the mountain or tow launching?
Today a H-2...
That would be a YOUNG person.
...had a shaky launch. Quickly popped the nose while transtioning from the grapevine to bottle grip. Stopped running too soon. got off but it was wind and glider saving him. Not getting in touch with the glider during launch will hurt you. The recent death from a blown launch of an old time pilot in Oz shows how serious focusing on the basics is.
We need to be our own worst critics when it comes to launching and landing.
And it doesn't hurt to have the videos up, does it?
Tuesday I had landing lessons with Kevin here at Quest. I took out my Sport instead of my Litespeed, so I could experiment without fear. Angel (my Litespeed) has far more opinions than Griffin (my Sport) about how she prefers to be flown and landed.
In retrospect, I should have worked on my landings long ago. I just didn't know that they needed work. Literally, in sixty or seventy landings, I would maybe have one beak or set down the control frame. I would just usually run a few steps, unless it was windy. My keel never slammed into the ground; my glider never performed a full stall, but I had safe, consistent landings.
Angel pointed out the flaws in my technique. About half the time, I would manage a decent landing. The other half, I would whack. My legs are covered with bruises from various flights. This was hint that it might be time to fix the flaws.
Kevin pointed out that I needed to flare at the BEGINNING of the flare window, not the end. I was also forgetting to stare at the horizon. This was my main focus for Tuesday. All my landings were -- as usual on beloved my Griffin -- "acceptable". I never set down the frame, much less beaked.
I started to figure out the timing Kevin wanted a little by the end. Bo, Awesome Bob, Steve Kroop, and Paul all had fun yelling things at me, as well as Kevin. So many chiefs, too bad there was only one Indian.
Kevin maintained a good attitude, even when I swore violently at him. (He decided the way to make me flare when he wanted me to was to run in front of me, though I solved the problem by turning as we wove our way down the runway).
Yesterday I ventured out to Quest again and set up, but Quest is supposed to be closed on Wednesday and all the tow pilots hid when they saw me. Kevin is pretty amazing, because he came up with an exercise anyhow. He tied bungees around my downtubes where he wanted my hands to be (Ralph's idea). Then we ran the Sport on the flat and I got to practice feeling exactly when the stall began at the root of the glider.
But today I got to actually fly again. I flew five patterns in extremely hard conditions. The wind was light and all over the place. I was SO much better, I mean, than I have EVER been, much less on Tuesday. All the landings were much crisper and a couple were "rock star". Woohoo woohoo I am learning! I mean you should have seen that glider stop! I have never been so happy. Of course I need to go out and work tomorrow morning and get my new feel solidified.
I flew the Sport this afternoon so I didn't have to set up Angel -- it was supposed to storm early. I sure love Griffin but she doesn't climb or glide like Angel. I guess you can't have it both ways. Paul (Russell lent him some wheels for his Rigid since he is still gimping) and Kevin were still up when I left after bombing out. And my landing was just OK again -- though pretty soon I will have them all the time.
Sorry for much ado about nothing, but I was so stoked I had to tell someone!
very light conditions at quest. me, paul, dustin, carl and jamie were going to fly out and back but not high enough so we flew around the patch. i worked small lift using carl's tips...he is english where conditions are weak, and is 2nd in world.
came in with no wind after an hour and had right wing drop. instead of wrestling gilder straight i tried to flare while desperately trying to straighten.
bad bad whack. horrible pain, i could not move. screaming with pain, literally. took a very long time to get me out and to the hospital. got very good drugs.
turned out to be badly dislocated shoulder. they had to knock me out to put it back in but it was so bad i kept waking up and screaming. finally they got it done but then they had a hard time waking me back up. drugs were so wierd by the end i could not leave for hours, i'd just start bawling for no reason.
am home now. will see ortho in the next few days. hopefully the damn thing will stay in joint so i can skip surgery. much better with the pain now it's back in joint. looking at maybe 6-8 weeks currently.
anyhow will be ok. pretty crappy day and it doesn't do much for the typing either.
We all know that our new gliders are more difficult to land. We have been willing to accept this with the rationalization that it is the unavoidable consequence of higher performance. But I see my job as a responsibility to challenge acceptance and rationalization. From my perspective, what I see in the landing zone and what I see in the statistics column is not acceptable. Crashes on landing are causing too many bent downtubes, too many minor injuries and too many serious or fatally injured pilots.
So what are we going to do? One reply is, "We should teach all those bozos how to land properly." Well, we've been trying that approach for the past few years and it has NOT worked!
And here we are twenty-three years and three and a half months later, Doug.
Gil Dodgen - 1995/01
All of this reminds me of a comment Mike Meier made when he was learning to fly sailplanes. He mentioned how easy it was to land a sailplane (with spoilers for glide-path control and wheels), and then said, "If other aircraft were as difficult to land as hang gliders no one would fly them."
And what's changed?
- USHGA has totally purged its ranks of people who see their jobs as responsibilities to challenge acceptance and rationalization and is totally geared for full bore acceptance and rationalization.
- Landing crashes, dislocated shoulders, and broken arms are considered to be background noise.
So I just came back from flying in Austria (awesome place btw). Stark difference I noticed is a large chunk of pilots choose to fly with skids instead of wheels. Conversations I had with pilots they say they actually work better in certain situations as they don't get plugged up like smaller wheels. Even larger heavier Atosses were all flying with skids. I was curious why they consistently chose to land on skids on those expensive machines and they were saying that it's just not worth the risk of a mistimed flare or wing hitting the ground... And those are all carbon frames etc.
...safe and sane landings - but it's pretty much overwhelmed by the instructional programs which all get all the new students totally hardwired for standup landings before they're halfway through the first session.
What are you going to do about landings. People land badly all the time. Wheels you say? Brilliant! Now, tell me what you do when your chosen LZ is a narrow dry riverbed with large rocks strewn all over the place. Better yet, you see what looks like a large green pasture so you head over there only to find out that it is in fact filled with 7-foot high corn, and now there is no usable LZ within glide. Wheels probably won't help you in either case.
Now YOU tell ME what you do when your chosen LZ is a wide open, wheel landable, brain dead easy airport after:
- the entire focus of your landing training, practice, mindset has been spot stop-on-a-dime emergency foot landings in narrow dry riverbeds with large rocks strewn all over the place and large green fields filled with seven foot high corn
- zilch training, practice, mindset for tight approaches for restricted fields
Very sad to report that there was a hang gliding fatality today in South Texas (Columbus). The pilot was electrocuted when he hit some power lines flying a Sport 2 glider. Kevin was well liked by all of the South Texas pilots and will be missed. He misjudged the power lines when trying to land. He leaves two teenage kids and a wife.
Kevin O'Brien - 91754 - H2 - 2012/07/14 - Gregg Ludwig - AT FL PL 360
and you find yourself looking at powerlines in front of you with no airspeed reserve.
Maybe would should be focusing our landing training, practice, mindset on putting gliders down as safely as possible in the environments in which good, responsible, long time pilots ACTUALLY land rather than crap in which stupid people occasionally get away with landing once or twice.
Dan Lukaszewicz - 2013/06/24 16:16:26 UTC
Alexandria, Virginia
My condolences to Kevin's family and friends for their profound loss.
Does anyone have any pictures or video of Kevin flying? Although I've never met him I would like to remember him enjoying the sport we share.
Just look at the photo of Bill Vogel above taken several weeks before HIS last flight when HE found himself looking at powerlines in front of him with no airspeed reserve. That should be reasonably close.
Conversely... You might wanna check out this video:
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.
...Steve Pearson coming in. His family and friends don't yet need anybody's condolences for their profound loss.
Kevin O'Brien had a fatal crash Sunday, landing out, near the Columbus, Texas airport.
H2 with good skills. Learned towing skills easily.
Was he at an around all that plenty long enough to understand what's what and who's who? Did he earn himself another fifteen pounds of weak link strength?
He handled wind well but was fearless of the wind as well.
Imagine walking around with a flat sack. Talking all castrato.
...a flat sacker talking all castrato.
He was an accomplished sailor. He failed to make it back to the airport landing a quarter mile north with no good landing options, clipped a power line and apparently was electrocuted.
Then it sounds like neither the wind itself was nor his lack of fear of it were the real issues here.
Should be something in the Columbus newspaper tomorrow. Flying Sport 2 since last fall.
William Olive - 2013/06/24 21:48:43 UTC
I hate reading news like this. Power lines, the all too often invisible enemy.
There's nothing to suggest that he didn't SEE them. Gregg said he came down with no good landing options.
But if the wind were too strong for him to make it back to the airport it appears to me that it would've been plenty strong enough to take him real fast to plenty of totally awesome options if he had run with it.
Now sounding to me like an unfortunate case of airport fixation.
But we also gotta ask why he:
- wasn't prepared for the situation in which he found himself
- was being flown in that much wind if wasn't prepared for the situation in which he found himself
And a lot of my original point from when I was envisioning him just missing the airport without a wind issue still stands. Time, energy, practice, focus on the landing strategy USHGA promotes would've been MUCH better spent and redirected towards avoiding dangerous landing situations and wimping out to the most easily accessible Happy Acres putting green.
Tad Eareckson wrote:Now sounding to me like an unfortunate case of airport fixation.
Yep.
Tad Eareckson wrote:But we also gotta ask why he:
- wasn't prepared for the situation in which he found himself
- was being flown in that much wind if wasn't prepared for the situation in which he found himself
Agree there as well. Kevin was a natural, learned quickly, and handled every new situation he encountered with skill. He was confident but not cocky. I hadn't flown that day before him so only knew of the conditions what I could tell from the ground, but I wasn't worried he'd encounter any trouble that day (nor was the tug pilot or anyone else around, apparently). I've warned newer pilots about getting downwind of the airport in stronger wind before, but the thought that I should warn Kevin Sunday never crossed my mind.
In retrospect, he probably shouldn't have been flying in those conditions. I can't help but feel that his death is a failing on us as mentors.
This is the third time I'm aware of that a newer pilot came up short of the airport and ended up in a scary situation. The last time was in February and we discussed airport fixation and better (specific) landing options downwind at the time. Clearly it wasn't enough.
Really too bad. Wasn't doing anything extraordinarily stupid and the penalty was WAY out of proportion to the crime - especially for a first offense. Shoulda broken a downtube or two or gotten stuck in a tree.
I'm skeptical of the electrocution verdict at this point and would bet ten bucks that all the powerlines did was put him out of control - stopped him from flying and dropped him or spun him around to downwind.
This will be the last time anything like this happens at Columbus but there wasn't much of a lesson to be learned and it didn't need to be driven home this forcefully.
It would still, however, be of some use to know where his hands were and whether or not the positioning was a relevant issue. Hope there was a camera and/or witness.
