Please explain yourself without deleting me
OK, OP...Orion Price - 2014/10/01 00:15:56 UTC
The problem with tad:
1. He's been writing the FAA trying to get aero-tow governmently regulated according to his protocol. If you chance upon his faux scholarly-ish article about areo tow safety you will see a window into the mind of a mad man. It's like 80 pages of ASCII text drawings of his Rube Goldberg designs. He's been mailing, and emailing his article to government agencies. I'm sure his communications get filed along with alien sightings, crop circles, and perpetual motion machines the FAA receives from other crackpots. Still weird behavior.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/skysailingtowing/message/7048
AT SOPs - proposed revisions
And then I waited for over five and a half months for one of you motherfuckers to point out a single punctuation mark that needed revision or deletion before I dropped anything into the mailbox and guess how much I got in the way of response.Tad Eareckson - 2009/05/09 14:33:21 UTC
Anybody wanna give this a skim and check for punctuation errors and stuff before I click it off to my new pen pal in a couple of days?
---
Gregory T. French
Aviation Safety Inspector
800 Independence Avenue
AFS 810 Room 832J
Federal Aviation Administration
Washington DC 20591-0001
202-493-5474
gregory.french@faa.gov
Dear Mr. French:
I am writing to you regarding concerns I have with the United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association's Standard Operating Procedures and practices regarding the conduct of the towing of unpowered by powered ultralight vehicles as allowed under FAA Exemption 4144.
As the principles involved in towing hang gliders are identical to those concerning sailplanes we should be modeling our protocols on techniques understood, accepted, and proven many decades ago in conventional aviation rather than making feeble and misguided efforts to reinvent these wheels.
The current SOPs - available at http://www.ushpa.aero - are problematic in terms of validity, scope, consistency, and compliance and these deficiencies translate to a great many minor crashes and incidents and a few very serious injuries and deaths.
The key to conducting safe towing operations is CONTROL. The Dragonfly tugs typically employed have more than enough of it but the gliders at the other end of the tow line most assuredly do not and cannot afford to squander any of their already limited potential.
Lacking the movable control surfaces of conventional aircraft, weight shift hang gliders are relatively sluggish in response and often require a great deal of physical effort to keep under control - especially on tow.
It is not an uncommon occurrence for hang gliders to be thrown by thermal turbulence (which is the reason they are launching in the first place) out of position to the point at which the tow is not recoverable and must be aborted. Occasionally significant altitude is lost during recovery and if that altitude is not available the pilot has virtually no chance of survival.
The control of a hang glider requires two hands at all times.
If the above statement is something of an oversimplification the following is not.
During a crisis situation - especially on tow - any relinquishment of a grip for so much as a fraction of a second can have lethal consequences.
From the current SOPs:The concept of an "easy reach" in a low level crisis situation is a completely oxymoronic MYTH. The technology to allow a pilot to maintain torque on the basetube with both hands while instantly actuating a release is cheap, has been available since the introduction of the Dragonfly in 1991, and has absolutely no downsides. The people who have a good idea what they are doing in this sport accept nothing less. The vast majority, however, need to be protected from themselves and a culture which operates under the philosophy that noncompliant second and third rate equipment is acceptable because crisis situations are rare and can usually be mitigated by someone at the front end of the tow line.A release must be placed at the hang glider end of the tow line within easy reach of the pilot.
While at least the concept - if not the practice - of being able to get off tow while maintaining control of the glider is universally accepted there is virtually no understanding that losing the tow at an inopportune moment can be every bit as lethal as not being able to terminate it.
Center of mass hang gliding towing was initiated in the UK three decades ago and was not widely accepted and implemented in the US and elsewhere for several years after that and hang gliding culture has never been able to shake its genetic memory of the period prior during which it was ALWAYS safer to be off tow than on.
The combination of low altitude and high angle of attack is one of the most dangerous to which one can subject an aircraft. And an aircraft under normal tow tension will ALWAYS experience an abrupt and dramatic increase in angle of attack when a release is actuated or a weak link fails.While USHPA requires a tug to be able to generate a minimum of 250 pounds of thrust and has circulated an advisory warning of the lethality of releasing a low partially stalled glider, its failure to specify a MINIMUM allowable weak link strength renders these policy positions almost completely without substance.The weak link at the glider end must have a breaking strength that will break before the towline tension exceeds twice the weight of the hang glider pilot and glider combination.
Hang gliding has adopted a loop of a particular type of one millimeter line - 130 pound Cortland Greenspot Braided Dacron Trolling Line - installed on one end of a bridle as its universal standard weak link for solo gliders of any weight or size based on the untested assumption that this loop fails at 260 pounds. It, in fact, frequently fails in flight at a half to a quarter or less of that figure.
Weak link breaks occur with monotonous frequency for all but the lightest of gliders and resulting crashes are commonplace - though most, in no small part thanks to the low stall speeds, are relatively minor.
As hang gliding culture has convinced itself that these weak links have become the only acceptable option for some long forgotten rational reason, flight park operators, tug pilots, and event and competition organizers very commonly refuse to allow medium light gliders and up to use anything which puts them at anywhere close to a reliable 1.0 Gs - a figure I view as the absolute minimum for expectation of a safe and reliable tow.This point MUST NOT be any more of an OPTION in hang gliding than it is in sailplane towing. It is extremely dangerous for a hang glider to be trailing 250 feet of Spectra routed in front of his basetube following a front end weak link break at low altitude.The weak link at the tow plane end of the towline should break with a towline tension approximately 100lbs. greater than the glider end.Most tugs and virtually all gliders engage the tow line by means of a bridle which runs through a ring on the end of the tow line. Separation is typically achieved by releasing one end of the bridle which allows it to but does not guarantee that it will run through and clear the ring.A weak link must be placed at both ends of the tow line.
Weak links are typically installed on the ends of bridles rather than of tow lines. Unless weak links are installed at both ends of bridles the weak link is removed from the equation in the event of a bridle wrap. Thus introducing this failure mode was formerly prescribed and almost universal practice and is still quite common today.By failing to define both a minimum allowable weak link rating and a maximum allowable required release actuation force this requirement is completely meaningless. Twenty-five pounds is a widely recognized top allowable required actuation force and releases should be able to function well under this limit at 2 Gs of tow line tension and 350 pounds of direct loading.This release shall be operational with zero tow line force up to twice the rated breaking strength of the weak link.
Gliders are almost universally equipped with extremely poorly designed releases which have been demonstrated on the ground and in the air to come nowhere close to any reasonable interpretation of the existing requirement.The referenced Aerotowing Guidelines are not available at the USHPA website and apparently do not exist. Past editions I have archived from unofficial sources are rife with inconsistencies and dangerous misinformation.Must give a complete discussion of aero tow vehicle operations including all normal and emergency procedures, and signals between aero tow pilot and glider pilot, in accordance with the USHPA Aero towing Guidelines.
Finally, even if the glider pilot takes the initiative to stray from the mainstream and properly equip himself and is ALLOWED to tow with a weak link of something approaching adequate strength, he still can, through no fault of his own, find himself in a situation in which his life is entirely dependent upon the tug pilot's understanding of equipment and emergency procedures.
As discussed above, unnecessary weak link failures must be regarded as potentially lethal events, not mildly annoying background noise as is now the case. The tug pilot must take seriously his responsibility of ensuring that his weak link not be the first to go.
And the tug pilot must understand that robbing the glider of the time, airspeed, power, and option to climb out of a dangerous situation should almost never be his first reaction to a crisis situation.
Situations in which Dragonflies find themselves in imminent danger as a consequence of having a glider on tow and out of position are somewhere between rare and nonexistent and when not jeopardized himself the tug pilot must take very seriously a decision to override the glider pilot's option to remain on tow. Unfortunately, due to inadequacies of training and failures of education, many tug pilots believe that there is no problem too large, serious, complicated, or inappropriate to be solved by an immediate squeeze of a release lever.
For many years I have tried to work within the community, culture, and organization of hang gliding to address these and other safety issues but have had little success beyond the conversion of a few isolated individuals. I believe the lack of a critical mass of understanding of the fundamental physics associated with towing within hang gliding which will prevent any significant improvement in our situation as a result of internal efforts. Conflict of interest issues may be a significant barrier as well.
Hang gliding in the United States is supposed to be primarily a self regulated aeronautical activity but over the course of the quarter century since the issuance of Exemption 4144 it has done a poor job of following even the bare minimum of its own hopelessly inadequate rules and the consequences of self regulation morphing into no regulation whatsoever have occasionally been catastrophic.
I feel that an outside review of the manner in which operations are being conducted would be the first step to helping improve the technology and safety of aerotowing to the long term benefit of all involved.
Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.
Sincerely,
Tad Eareckson
You're simultaneously sure that my communicationS get filed along with the alien sightings, crop circles, and perpetual motion machines the FAA receives from other crackpots and terrified that I'm gonna get areo-tow governmently regulated according to my protocol. So just how many of you motherfuckers have written the FAA to discredit any of my concerns and make SURE that my communications get filed along with the alien sightings, crop circles, and perpetual motion machines?
That's what any LEGITIMATE person would do. But LEGITIMATE people up in the hang gliding power hierarchy are ONE HUNDRED PERCENT NONEXISTENT. They're all cockroaches like you - focused entirely on suppressing free speech and open discourse.
By the way...
Does the FAA actually GET any communications about alien sightings, crop circles, perpetual motion machines? Doesn't it get a bit painful reaching up your ass as far and frequently as you do?
