Glider collision Bowenville

[Teckair]

More BS. In a glider, you establish FUST ( Flaps, Undercart, Speed, Trim) on downwind and you don't set them up for diving inverted into the ground. You modify your circuit height and speed by the use of the brakes and sideslipping.

It is posts like this that put people off using these forums.

 

 

[Mike Borgelt]

Oscar was being completely factual.

 

Looking at the picture in the link I posted this morning I'd say the glider impacted at 45 to 60 degrees nose down. 60 degrees gets you 87% of the impact velocity of vertical. Probably not enough difference to matter. To the people watching it would have looked vertical from where they were seeing it.

 

 

[Teckair]

Yeah he might be however there are different ways of saying things. I thought he said it was inverted.

 

 

[Mike Borgelt]

Oscar: "More BS. In a glider, you establish FUST ( Flaps, Undercart, Speed, Trim) on downwind and you don't set them up for diving inverted into the ground."

 

Seems pretty clear to me.

 

 

[Teckair]

What ever.

 

 

[M61A1]

Oscar was being completely factual.Looking at the picture in the link I posted this morning I'd say the glider impacted at 45 to 60 degrees nose down. 60 degrees gets you 87% of the impact velocity of vertical. Probably not enough difference to matter. To the people watching it would have looked vertical from where they were seeing it.

I though that Oscar was being very presumptuous.....You may be supposed to establish 'FUST', but looking at the incident history of 'gear up' landings, amongst other things, it is clear that they do not always.

Or perhaps he was correct..."you must establish 'FUST', or bad things can happen.

 

 

[Old Koreelah]

Something similar happened to Blanik UX not long after I'd gone solo in it. Same instructor too.

 

 

[Darkwalker]

I learned to fly with the Canberra Gliding Club. I agree with the points made by Mike Borgelt. Taking off and flying the aircraft was learned fairly quickly. Landings require so much judgement and experience that the student is challenged to absorb with (obviously) only one per flight. I never soloed in the Blanik but instead in the Pteradactyl ultralight that I was building at the time. I think that for most people, calm conditions in the early morning are best for initial training.

Thats the thinking of my instructor too "calm conditions in the early morning are best for initial training".

 

At Goolwer in the warmer months, every man and his dog comes out including the meat bombers. The training area gets congested with sightseers of the Murray mouth and the lakes.

 

Flying first thing in the morning avoids the lunchtime and afternoon rush.

 

 

[Oscar]

Ordinarily, I would not be bothered to react to the adverse posts on here to my comments, it's not worth the time or effort.

 

However, in this particular case, I find the uninformed supposition on what is as yet an unexplained accident to be worse than unhelpful.

 

As it happens, one of my family is a member of DDSC; and as it happens, the now widow of the Instructor was one of his students many years ago when he was an Instructor at Bathurst. He last talked to both the Instructor and his wife last week at the DDSC AGM, and his opinion of the Instructor corresponds exactly with Mike Borgelt's opinion expressed in post #8 of this thread.

 

As it also happens, I have landed a glider in a situation of extreme medical incapacitation. Due to influenza and dehydration, I experienced an almost total physical collapse at about 2K feet AGL, just after release from the tug. I had not intended to fly that day but was asked by the CFI to move his personal racing glider ( a Hornet, and then current holder of the World record for a 500K triangle speed at the time), to the cross-strip at Narromine due to a 90-degree wind change. It was already hitched to the tug, it seemed the easy thing to do..

 

I cannot remember anything after turning final, until someone was pressing their fingers on my neck and shouting 'He's alive, I can feel a pulse'. As far as I am concerned, it basically landed itself due to correct setting of the trim at the FUST check.

 

You fly MOST gliders (I cannot speak of personal experience for an ASK21) with your hand on your right knee and two fingers and your thumb on the stick. You do NOT have a 'death grip' on the stick that would force it into an extreme change of pitch even in a case of muscular spasm.

 

This is a very,very sad event and the circumstances have yet to be revealed. Vicious defence of wild theories coming from a base of no knowledge of gliders, gliding, or glider pilot training does not help anybody's appreciation of actually what happened.

 

 

[Yenn]

Ginen that we are told it dived the last 50 feet, from a normal approach and with experience of the causes of powered flight accidents, my first thought was a stall at low speed. A hard push on the stick would also cause a nose dive, but there would be ample warning coming from the negative Gs.

 

Not having flown that type of glider I cannot comment on the possibility of this happening, but it seems the most likely to me.

 

 

[Teckair]

Ordinarily, I would not be bothered to react to the adverse posts on here to my comments, it's not worth the time or effort.However, in this particular case, I find the uninformed supposition on what is as yet an unexplained accident to be worse than unhelpful.

 

As it happens, one of my family is a member of DDSC; and as it happens, the now widow of the Instructor was one of his students many years ago when he was an Instructor at Bathurst. He last talked to both the Instructor and his wife last week at the DDSC AGM, and his opinion of the Instructor corresponds exactly with Mike Borgelt's opinion expressed in post #8 of this thread.

 

As it also happens, I have landed a glider in a situation of extreme medical incapacitation. Due to influenza and dehydration, I experienced an almost total physical collapse at about 2K feet AGL, just after release from the tug. I had not intended to fly that day but was asked by the CFI to move his personal racing glider ( a Hornet, and then current holder of the World record for a 500K triangle speed at the time), to the cross-strip at Narromine due to a 90-degree wind change. It was already hitched to the tug, it seemed the easy thing to do..

 

I cannot remember anything after turning final, until someone was pressing their fingers on my neck and shouting 'He's alive, I can feel a pulse'. As far as I am concerned, it basically landed itself due to correct setting of the trim at the FUST check.

 

You fly MOST gliders (I cannot speak of personal experience for an ASK21) with your hand on your right knee and two fingers and your thumb on the stick. You do NOT have a 'death grip' on the stick that would force it into an extreme change of pitch even in a case of muscular spasm.

 

This is a very,very sad event and the circumstances have yet to be revealed. Vicious defence of wild theories coming from a base of no knowledge of gliders, gliding, or glider pilot training does not help anybody's appreciation of actually what happened.

You can correct someone without calling them ignorant and BS.

 

 

[nomadpete]

The aircraft was almost new, well maintained, and a docile, predictable trainer. The instructor was very experienced, conservative, an admirable promotor of safety culture and (from personal knowledge) pretty much guaranteed to have set trim (FUST) before half way downwind. Also hard to believe that airspeed would be permitted to decay on final. Bear in mind that when landing a glider, one must virtually fly it almost into the ground. There is always a good margin of safety with airspeed.

 

I can only surmise that an extraordinary event occurred late on final.

 

Nothing more can be guessed at.

 

Anything more IS just guesswork, and risks unfairly maligning our lost comrade.

 

Please be respectful with posts.

 

 

[graham brown]

All said above about the glider, gliding and the pilot is true. I have instructed in the ask21 for many years and it is very stable with no vices, does not spin easily and stalls normally. The pilot was of the highest calibre and it makes you wonder if it has happened to Jeremy then it could happen to me. Speculation on this one is not helping anyone to deal with it as we know standards of the glider and pilot could not be higher. The speculation is unfortunately offensive. Please let this be for a while until some facts come out.

 

 

[turboplanner]

Given the high regard for the pilot and glider, perhaps an incapacitation with a twist, however Post #2 quotes a Police officer certain that a mechanical error occurred.

 

What is the process for GFA accident investigations?

 

Are the results published, or is it the same as RAA?

 

 

[graham brown]

GFA ops and airworthiness will do a report for exec officer ops. The investigation will get published by GFA and summarised by the EO ops in the magazine.

 

 

[kaz3g]

Here's a link to the student pilot who died.'I have a few hours in the ASK21's in California. You won't find a more gentle, well mannered, less twitchy glider. If nobody was flying I'd have expected it to do a hard landing and bounce from that position . The stick moves a long way fore and aft to get it to pitch forward suddenly like that takes little force but you need to move it a fair way.

More than a "few" if I remember correctly. And in the ASW20, the Ventus and many others over some 3000 hours which is a lot of time in a glider.

 

Kaz

 

 

[bull]

It is posts like this that put people off using these forums.

Agreed Techy, I was only saying what I had heard at the field,and Oscar jumped on the bandwagon like a defence lawyer,,,,,,,

 

 

[Mike Borgelt]

I'll disagree with Graham Brown. Sure there will be speculation. It does no harm and possibly a lot of good as it explores multiple scenarios which might cause people to think RIGHT NOW about ALL the things that can go wrong, not just what happened in the particular case with a report released months after the event. One of the speculative scenarios may even be one that the investigators would not have thought of.

 

I've also seen one GFA accident report that was cocked up beyond belief by a bad assumption made by one of the investigators. Fortunately nobody was dead but it was damn close.

 

We have the problem of people running the activity investigating themselves. Anyone remember why ATSB was set up? Because the Regulator was NEVER going to find itself or its regulations at fault.

 

I find the "lets wait for the official report" attitude akin to "let's sweep this under the carpet and continue on as if nothing happened".

 

Kaz, 2700 hours in 60 different types including variants, much of it cross country and over 500 in competition. 1150 power, of which 1050 in the BD-4, mostly cross country transport.

 

 

[onetrack]

I've also seen one GFA accident report that was cocked up beyond belief by a bad assumption made by one of the investigators

And therein lies the problem with numerous crash investigations - a lack of detective or police training on many investigators part, that teaches you how to avoid assumptions, and how to avoid foregone conclusions, that make untrained investigators adjust the evidence to match their foregone conclusion.Medical events are one of the most difficult to come to a satisfactory conclusion, as regards to just what part the bodily evidence of organ condition, or dysfunction, played in the performance of the pilot.

 

I had a BIL who had a weak heart most of his life. He had his first heart attack when in his late 30's and had a total of 5 heart attacks - all of which he survived or was rescuscitated from clinical death.

 

He died last year at 70 of his 6th and final heart attack.

 

I can remember him telling me about how, during one early heart attack he had (which fortunately happened in a hospital lobby, where he was going, to register his concern about recurring chest pains), that he could clearly recall the effect on him, as his heart stopped.

 

He was still walking into the hospital as his heart stopped, and he said he could remember his vision just closed in from the sides to a pinpoint, over a few seconds - and then nothing, until he woke up after rescuscitation.

 

Other family members said he just dropped like a stone alongside them - but according to him, it wasn't an instantaneous event, it took 15 to 20 seconds to happen, and he was aware that something was seriously wrong, but was trying to to come to grips with what was actually happening to his body.

 

There are numerous crash reports where the conclusion was that an incapacitating medical event was suspected of being the cause of the crash - but it could not be proven conclusively, as it was difficult to come to a firm conclusion as to whether there was still adequate blood circulation to carry out tasks effectively, or whether there was a complete cessation of blood circulation, leading to total incapacitation.

 

 

[kaz3g]

I'll disagree with Graham Brown. Sure there will be speculation. It does no harm and possibly a lot of good as it explores multiple scenarios which might cause people to think RIGHT NOW about ALL the things that can go wrong, not just what happened in the particular case with a report released months after the event. One of the speculative scenarios may even be one that the investigators would not have thought of. .

If the speculation were informed then I would agree. But uninformed speculation on lists like this or worse, in the media, can and often does cause additional grief to those intimately connected to the deceased. I support the release of an early interim report of the known facts and then some informed contributions may actually be of assistance rather than chasing rabbits down burrows.

 

We SHOULD be able to discuss all the things that can go wrong without referring to a current investigation such as continuing to attempt to gain lift below a safe height, failure to continually identify suitable out landing areas within the glide slope, stretching the glide, turning back at low height, dehydration, failing to keep a good lookout, and flying when not medically fit to do so.

 

Running into a wire fence has killed a few, including a friend's father, and I would therefore add the thought that landing wheel down in a paddock patently too short to pull up in even with a ground loop may not be the best choice. The desire to save the aircraft has to always be second to saving the crew but most of us have lost friends trying to do just that.

 

Kaz

 

 

[M61A1]

I would think that the better shape that the aircraft is in after it's all over, the better shape I'm going to be in. I know someone personally that has been severely injured after going through a fence, but I don't know if landing , knowing the fence is there, or landing , then finding out there's a fence is how most of these happen. All our military helis have wire cutters fitted, and I would hazard a guess that we've had less wire strikes in those, than gliders through fences. Has anyone ever looked seriously into some kind of wire guide along the top of the canopy? Surely a thin metal strip of some kind would have to offer a degree of protection.

 

I sometimes wonder whether some of these fatalities involving students ( both powered and gliders) might involve unwanted control inputs from students. I'm not suggesting that is the case here, But it would have to be a possibility.

 

I had an instructor friend tell me how he once bent a control stick unstalling an aircraft when the student panicked, and I'm fairly sure there has been some discussion on that subject (dealing with heavy handed students) on this forum.

 

With CVRs and such the real causes may never be known, and I'm sure that there are some that would like all that sort of thing made mandatory.

 

 

[Oscar]

M6: would that bent stick have been in a Blanik? I ask, because a family member when a Gliding Instructor had a student freeze on the stick, and when trying to take command, felt the stick partially tear away from the cross-tube..

 

 

[M61A1]

M6: would that bent stick have been in a Blanik? I ask, because a family member when a Gliding Instructor had a student freeze on the stick, and when trying to take command, felt the stick partially tear away from the cross-tube..

'Fairly certain it was a Drifter.