Aerotow Industry people are...
http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=24846
Is this a joke ?
Jim Rooney - 2011/08/26 17:34:33 UTC
Have we considered straight pin releases?
Yes.
I'm mostly fine with them... as I've said many times in the past by the way.
Do be aware that they have their issues as well. In contrast to his holliness's assertions, they can jam. I've had one do so, so he can get stuffed, he's wrong. It has to do with how they're built, specifically, the line on the pilot end crunches up cuz it's too tight of a tolerance for the small barrel that's necessary to use with a straight pin.
My point is that everything has issues. Everything. Period.
Will I fly with a straight pin release? Sure.
Does it have the track record of the curved pins? No.
Does it have limitations that the curved pins don't? Yes, yes it does.
Do they matter? Depends on your situation.
Try fitting a straight pin release with anything but weaklink. (it doesn't quite fit the same) OH! Right. Just might be that we've thought of that eh?
...SCUM. They either ARE egomaniacal totally incompetent lying morons like Jim Keen-Intellect Rooney or tolerate them amongst their ranks.
We give them total solid equipment that NEVER fails in the air and they either find some way to sabotage it on the ground or, failing that, just pronounce that it WILL fail.
Then they go to Stage Two. Because you're using equipment for which there's a one hundred percent CERTAINTY of failure at some point in your flying career it's ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL that you use one of our magic loops of fishing line, which has an extremely high probability of dumping you into a dangerous stall every single time you fly in thermal conditions, because it MIGHT break at JUST THE RIGHT TIME *WHEN* your release fails - which, obviously, will be in a critical life or death situation.
And people buy that crap and incorporate it into their mindsets - ignoring the arithmetic that shows that:
- Even if a release has a mandatory failure rate of five percent the chances of having:
-- a failure line up with a critical situation in which the failure will make a difference are about the same as the ones for getting disemboweled in the setup area by an escaped circus tiger
-- this previous situation defused by a perfectly timed magic fishing line break are about the same as the ones for getting vaporized by a stray death ray blast from a dogfight between the runway and the moon in an interstellar conflict between a couple of our neighboring solar systems
- A glider that flies with magic fishing line that requires two launches for every successful climb to workable altitude is a hundred times as likely to get significantly crashed as a glider that flies with its primary release welded shut and no fishing line at all.
- Magic fishing line WILL ELIMINATE from your career many of the best hours and days of flying you'd have otherwise experienced over the course of your career.
Sorry. I got started. But the main point of this was/is:
I think there have been cases where the throttle got stuck wide open.
Even if you experience that equipment malfunction with no kill switch available ANYWHERE, no means of shutting down or even slowing the engine, when's it gonna matter? 99.99 percent of the time you're gonna be able to just point the nose up and wait until you run outta gas.
In the incident with the idiot on the Soarmaster to make things exciting he had to:
- use a dangerous throttle control installation AND
- use a dangerous kill switch installation AND
- fail to balance the prop AND
- lose a blade
And, fuck, he STILL puts the plane down softly with no feathers rearranged.
So if we can do the engineering with tons of optimization and redundancy without significant tradeoffs in weight, drag, cost, compromises affecting other considerations (which we can EASILY do in glider aerotow configurations - and HAVE, in fact, done) go for it. But if there's some problem backing up a both-hands-on-the-basetube throttle control with a both-hands-on-the-basetube kill switch then we've got better things to worry about than the downside of just having the kill switch within an easy one handed swat on the harness somewhere.
Frank's story is a sad one.
Yep. For a few hundred dollars worth of design, parts, fabrication for a one-off assembly he could've squeezed a button velcroed to a finger and aborted the tow without so much as a slight increase in pulse rate. Would've been a total nonevent. Then we could've made copies for a couple hundred bucks a pop and this guy:
022-04610
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2809/13746340634_a74b33d285_o.png
http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3708/13746233274_c1a80f35c1_o.png
088-05301
wouldn't have had his life destroyed.
But instead Santos used some cheap useless whatever and a two second window opened and closed forever. Devastating effects on the family, end of Santos's long career in hang gliding and the beginning of a remainder of a life with that permanently on his conscience.
But what's indescribably infuriating is that after Steve Kinsley and I racked our brains, engineered the hell out of several solutions that WOULD have made that a nonevent, put stuff in the air, offered the technology and all the help anyone might want for free the Ridgely, Manquin, Quest, Davis, Lookout caliber pigfuckers who run this show just pissed all over us and our work.
If I got dropped on some rock in the Pacific with some of these pieces of shit I'd do everything within my power to make Lord of the Flies look like one of the lighter episodes of Gilligan's Island.