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"I watched the incident first hand. I hope you all have
the correct understanding of the incident. Here's what
I saw:
Joe enterd a thermal. seeing this a little higher and
not far away, I started heading for him. The glider
pitched back upon entering the thermal. As soon as it
did, Joe pulled a little brake, Joe's glider piched back
further because it wanted no brake at that moment.
Then the wing attempted to move forward. When it did,
Joe pulled all the brake he could and held it....for a
long time. The tips slowly started to peel back and
stall, finally the whole glider fell back into what
looked like a purposefull fullstall (massive brake
pull for a long time). When he comes under the glider, he
was not holding enough brake to keep a stall or
prevent the wing from a surge to 90 and full frontal/
line slack, into a asymetric deflation that crevatted and
then spirales to reserve toss/ tree landing.
A similar thing happened the day before with Joe, but he
was able to recover. I did not see the beginning of
that one but I saw him whip stalling the glider until
finally after a big surge to line slack deflation
shock opening in to straight flight recovery.
Joe just comes off a Bolero Plus. He orderd the zoom
and booked a clinic with me in Seattle. The weather
did not allow us to complete the course and a couple
months later, Joe was in mexico with his zoom. Not
until the last day was his incident. I think he was
strung out from the prior incident and was afraid of
getting a frontal. It was great to see Joe was OK
after the event.
My advice is: Do not be in a big hurry to get a higher
performance wing or go into big conditions unless you
know your game is on...
Yea, a crevat will usually make the glider go into SAT when no input is there to slow the turn. A little brake will bring it out of SAT into normal spiral mode. Once a glider loads up to speed in that situation it can take a lot of brake force to stop it. When you do it's easy to brake right into a stall.
I'm not really trying to figure out what happened after the inital stall. Everything looked normal for the given piloting to me at the time. I recongnized a few times when brake or no brake, ect. would have had him recover. At the time, I thought the glider was very kind to him considering he could have ended up with lines caught on him, or going in the canopy.
This was a S.I.T. maneuver "self induced trama" do not even think about blaming the wing, mexico, or the day - the way I see it.."
"He has the diaper bag in his hand and the reserve deployed but he did
not collapse the wing to have the reserve take over fully. To me he was
lucky. I have flown with a half wrap for the past dozen years. I tend to
adjust the brakes when the wing is new, but it has me thinking that I
should double check it out at MDO next time and adjust if needed."
"He's got the reserve bag in his hand - (why? -I don't know) but his
reserve
saved him.
After seeing this, I may not fly with the "HALF WRAP" that I usually fly
with."
"Holy smokes, that should come with a parental guidance warning or
something - I was gripping the arms of my chair as I watched it! And
now my girlfriend is demanding to watch it... But at least its good to
see the chute really does work (except for the last 20 ft down the tree).
As a P2 who hasn't made it past the 600ft hill yet (okay there was the
O'Connors manouvers course) I'm curious how high he was when things started to go wrong, and how we got into the spiral/spin so fast and
couldn't recover. Is there more to the story that I missed somewhere?
Hopefully no broken bones or serious injuries after the crash from the
top of the tree."
"wow!
looks like he was quite low. deployed about 500'. I'd guess he was about 2000' to 3000' over when the fan was struck with smelly stuff. He tried to recover for about 40 seconds. death spiral = about 3000fpm descent, reasonable reserve parachute = 12 to 15 fpm descent. Could have been a greater descent rate if it was caused by falling out of a powerful thermal.
asymetric on the right into full frontal, into big surge spin and spiral before that. Looks like a little cravat on the left side too, but can't be certain.
The fish eye lens makes it look higer than it actually is.
He probably could have recovered, given another few thousand feet. I hope he had a change of underwear..:-)"
"It looked a bit familiar.
But on closer inspection...
He didn't get multiple (unrecoverable) riser-twists.
His canopy wasn't 50% wrapped in the lines on one side
during the entire descent.
He didn't do a dynamic forward loop over the top of the canopy.
He had a reserve, and nice friendly trees to land in.
And I'm guessing he's still as tall as he was before.
Nah ... that was just a woosie little collapse really ;-)"
More discussion...
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