Bob,
Actually, your writing, comprehension, logic, and questioning is excellent as well (in my opinion).
Ditto. These are the kinds of people we need to effect change and counter the Tracy Tillmans and other people who "think" that ten thousand hours of airtime makes them smarter than fifth graders. (What the hell happened to Scott anyway? I was really hoping he'd be engaging in some of this.)
I think you might lighten up on the 4 letter words...
I recently saw "The King's Speech" - all the way to the bloody end of the credits at which time there were about a half dozen of us left. Just before the reel ran out there was a big blue "R" on the screen. I thought, "Huh? Must be a typo." I left the theater and checked the poster at the exit. A chick had beat me to it and was looking at it for the same reason. We just looked at each other in astonishment. THAT was rated R?!?!?
And "The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe" which is this mass scale bloodbath of all of the totally virtuous people and animals hacking apart all the totally evil people and animals is rated PG and crawling with six-year-olds.
On the Jack Show I posted a hook-in failure fatality by the name of Dick Stark. He came back as d*** Stark.
On PBS a couple of years ago I watched the clip of George C. Scott saying, "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." They not only bleeped out "bastard" but fuzzed over his mouth to spare any lip readers the horror.
There's supposed to be a First Amendment in this country and I'm tired of having it gutted by the theocracy of stupid evil Sunday school teachers who run it. Talk about "nanny states". When I need to tell Marc Fink to go f*ck himself I don't wanna have him confused by an asterisk 'cause he's real easily confused enough as it is.
So it's your site and you can swap in asterisks if you must and in the future I'll try to cool off for a couple of hours after an exchange with Tracy before posting but maybe give me a little rein.
...and try to be shorter (my biggest challenge as well), and you might make more progress.
Disagree. We're dealing with aviation and lives and if all people can handle with their twelve second attention spans is three partial sentence posts there's always the Jack Show.
There, if somebody says anything that has too many paragraphs, sentences, words or syllables for someone else to feel like reading, he can just click a "Sink This!" button to put it where nobody else can easily find it. Why bother with the tedium of writing a whole sentence addressing an issue when you can so conveniently express your contempt for someone else with a simple click?
If someone asks you a one sentence question that takes thirty pages to answer you write the thirty pages. If there are people on this wire who can't figure out how not to read stuff that doesn't interest them then Peter Birren is your dream moderator.
I will. But I'm not expert enough in the specifics of towing or training or tandems to be any help there. That's why I'm trying to bring together the experts to handle those disciplines.
NONE of this stuff is rocket science. NONE of this stuff requires that you've ever done it or been around it. There is NOTHING you need to know beyond high school physics to kick Dr. Tracy S. Tillman's a**. You can even kick his a** with grade school stuff. These people ARE TOTAL MORONS.
I kited a paraglider ONCE a couple of times and went up on a towed tandem sled with Alan Chuculate ONCE.
Over at the Paraglider Forum a couple of Decembers ago the subject of weak links was brought up by one Alan Maguire who correctly suspected that BHPA regulations were stupid and dangerous. I waded in and ruled those a**holes for nearly three months before they hit the ban button. If you've never flown anything but understand high school physics there's not a sailplane or hang or para glider pilot on the planet who can lay a glove on you.
If you learned to fly a hang glider you know most of what you need to know about training. And tandem is just like solo 'cept with twice as many idiots hanging from the keel.
As an engineer, I'm interested in everything, but if I follow each detail, then I won't be able to build the bigger organization.
You don't need to follow every detail. I can probably teach a smart fourteen-year-old kid everything he really needs to know about towing in half an hour - ten or fifteen minutes if he's flying a kite at the beach.
You didn't comment on my 2011/02/17 16:35:36 post. Understand that and you're way ahead of Donnell and Dennis.
What magic wands? Pens?
No. MAGIC WANDS. REAL magic wands. Crystal balls. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT.
But what about the other half?
Both of these people ARE GOING TO BE QUADED. Crystal balls don't lie.
Yes, but are you saying we should never allow pilots to experiment with the potential benefits of forward sweep? What about canard designs? Should they be forever banned because the tail belongs in the rear?
ABSOLUTELY NOT.
For all I know I may have screwed the pooch and prevented this guy from discovering how to get a hundred to one glide out of an Eaglet. But he was in MY class and I felt at the time that he should probably get in a half dozen or so flights with the pointy end forward before he put on his test pilot hat.
Under existing regulations a glider's gotta be certified to be legally aerotowed. But nobody, myself included, is saying anything about surface towing or jumping off private mountains. So go nuts. If it's lethally divergent sell it on eBay. Just don't put my nephew on it if you're a US Hawks certified instructor working on getting him his Hang One before you get it HGMA certified.
And that's how we learn.
bulls***. We didn't learn a goddam thing from that that we didn't know a hundred years before. We already knew that Sea Otters and oil don't mix - or, actually, DO. We had a bunch of regulations in place that nobody bothered to follow or enforce and we unleashed environmental hell on earth. You only need to shoot five or six kids in the face with a shotgun before you can pretty accurately predict what's gonna happen the next time. Likewise we know that people with release actuators on downtubes are about a hundred times more likely to die than people with release actuators on basetubes - but we don't even have any regulations for people to ignore and not enforce.
Of course we should take reasonable steps to keep these things from happening.
But we didn't and don't.
But the cost of truly guaranteeing that they can never happen is far too high.
There were no asteroids involved in Exxon Valdez, BP Deepwater Horizon, or Shane Smith. It was all shoddy, illegal operation and incompetence. We're not talking about guaranteeing that it can NEVER happen - we're talking about preventing it from happening for obvious and predictable reasons with cheap fixes 99 percent of the time.
And only a microscopic percentage of the cost of doing it wrong is ever borne by perps.
Even the best towing system (or oil tanker) in the world has failure modes.
1. THE OIL TANKER DIDN'T FAIL. It was DRIVEN though glassy smooth water onto the rocks with a long list of very relevant personnel and equipment regulations violations. With a look at the chart and four minutes lead time I coulda gotten through there myself.
2. Tony Ameo's glider didn't fail. He flew it into a tree because he was more concerned about a stupid useless standing up spot landing for a stupid useless Hang Three requirement than he was about getting into a hundred acre field. But we need to be able to do stupid useless standing up spot landings to make us safe pilots - regardless of how dangerous stupid useless standing up spot landings actually prove to be.
3. Shane Smith's release DID fail - as any idiot could've EASILY predicted it WOULD.
4. We're not killing people towing because of unpredictable and unavoidable towing system failures. Even as shoddily as that Phoenix show was being run I could've saved that kid with an extra three bucks of equipment.
So the only guarantee is to never tow at all. The same is true for flying in general, and the same is true for living.
I don't expect everybody to get in and out of towing alive. But I'm saying that if it were done competently we could use good equipment at two thirds of the cost of the crap in the air now and eliminate 99 percent of the undesired results. But we've decided both that bent pins and one per thousand per year fatality rates are acceptable enough in hang gliding that they're not worth doing anything about.
The only question is where (and how) do we draw the line.
Bent pins? Brake levers on downtubes? Velcro? Half G weak links? Can we start there?
Personally, I think that "line" should be drawn by those with the most at stake.
They're too ignorant, incompetent, and/or stupid. They need to understand high school physics first. Only one in twenty has got a prayer. The rest of them hafta have the line drawn for them by a culture controlled by people who do, like in REAL aviation - the kind into which I could send my nephew.
In hang gliding, that's generally the person hooked into the glider.
We gotta get Matt, Tracy, and Steve Wendt a little more invested in the stakes too so they can't keep getting away with this "pilot error" crap they do.
Take the HGAA for example...
It would probably take me a few hours to properly understand that paragraph but as soon as I saw the HGAA thing start rolling with Jack's name in it I may have had more practical understanding of it than you do now.
So will we ever have the critical mass?
Maybe, maybe not. But by building a solid model we may do a lot of good we won't even live to see. "Whoa! These guys had it NAILED forty years ago!" If first you don't succeed lower your expectations.
The other problem is that there is no national forum where USHPA's leadership has to answer to the pilots - like you - who will call them on their decisions.
This is why God gave us frivolous lawsuit attorneys.
Some people are better at resisting it than others, but I believe all people need feedback from their mistakes to keep them on track.
Sometimes a couple of years at a medium security facility is all it takes.
Maybe you should add that URL to your signature here to help advertise it.
Doesn't really matter. As long as someone with a brain is talking somewhere.
I'm not sure I agree...
If you don't by the time I'm finished tuning you in I haven't finished tuning you in.
It may not be "radically different", but it is different. It's been refined and optimized.
OK, let's start with a straight stainless steel pin and go to a straight titanium pin next year.
I like the idea of functional standards much better than equipment standards.
That's all I've written in my proposed revisions.
But even there you run the risk of defining a functionality which isn't needed by a different and more creative approach.
There are NO well defined required standards for aerotowing and nothing is enforced. There are NO required standards for any other type of towing whatsoever. When I started in hang gliding over thirty years ago people were getting killed by releases they couldn't get to in lockouts and everyone was scared shitless of them. Today people are still getting killed by releases they can't get to in lockouts and everyone is still scared shitless of them.
So where are all these different and more creative approaches that have been coming out of this regulation-free Utopia of ours?
The Koch two stage is one of the best engineered, safest, most effective releases in the world and pretty much the only existing sane answer to two stage towing. It came out of Germany in or before 1985 where they've got a bunch of former Nazis regulating the crap out of everything.
Let's work to fix it. You've got forums here and on KiteStrings. Post away.
Oh Gawd... AGAIN? How 'bout just going through:
http://ozreport.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15337I ripped the crap out of the Aussie Methodist morons on that one.
They're all better versions of something else that existed before them.
Define "better".
A Golden Retriever is a type of highly evolved Gray Wolf. What they're mostly better at is sucking up to humans. Gray Wolves, on the other hand, totally suck at sucking up to humans. And because the North American continent is infested with an unsustainably high population of humans there are WAY more Golden Retrievers in it than Gray Wolves. Thus, from an evolutionary standpoint, Golden Retrievers are more successful - or "better" - than Gray Wolves.
But set the Golden Retrievers "free" in Yellowstone National Park for a winter and see how well they do at pulling down Buffalo and defending the kills against Grizzlies.
They may not even try that at all. They may try to find some open water and wait at the edge for a duck to drop dead midflight and fall into it.
Humans aren't evolving into smarter monkeys. They have come to group into huge colonies of tens or hundreds of millions. These colonies are not controlled by the most intelligent of the monkeys. They're controlled by the monkeys that are best at bullying, sucking up to, and manipulating the greatest number of other monkeys. The stupider the other monkeys the more secure the bullying, manipulative monkeys are in their positions of control.
The bullying, manipulative monkeys recognize the most intelligent monkeys as their greatest threats and will do everything they can to eliminate them from the population and thus the gene pool. Spanish Inquisition, the Klan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Joseph McCarthy, Khmer Rouge, Tienanmen Square, Pinochet, Myanmar, Iran, Mubarak, Gaddafi, USHGA, Highland Aerosports, Tracy, Peter Birren, Davis, Jack.
Anyone who can keep their eye on the ball long enough to speak up gets silenced.
See?
Ya wanna do a little genetic engineering to make things "better" as the smarter monkeys would like to think of the term, you do it like this:
http://www.primates.com/baboons/culture.htmlI'm sure that when beavers first started building dams it screwed things up for some kind of wild life.
I'm sure of just the opposite. The first beaver dam built did exactly what the last beaver dam built did. Diversified the habitat, decreased runoff and erosion, and increased the area of wetlands, charge going to the aquifer, and predictability of access to a reserve of water - a resource upon which all life depends. And they ALWAYS left plenty of miles of regular stream available for whatever was dependent on or happiest in that kind of habitat. So nothing had to adapt to them or go extinct. In fact that stuff was LESS likely to go extinct 'cause the beavers created reserves which kept the streams going through droughts. I'm pretty sure that there was very little in the way of wildlife that wasn't lining up to shake the paws of the first pair of beavers that got that trick right.
Ya wanna see plants, wildlife, diversity... go to an oasis or water hole. Stuff in the Everglades loves 'gators - even though it gets eaten once in a while - 'cause 'gators make 'gator holes which provide open water when everything else dries up.
The only animals that hate beavers are bipedal monkeys who swing sticks at little white balls and don't want them landing in aquatic ecosystems when they f*ck up.
The scales are different (massively different), but humanity is just following the same principles that all other living things have followed.
bulls***. As soon as we half smart monkeys learned to rub sticks together to make fires, tie sharp rocks to sticks to poke into other animals and smarter monkeys, and tie sticks together to float to New Zealand we began causing mass extinctions and irreversible habitat destruction every place we went. And we just get better and better at making bigger hotter fires, bigger things out of bigger sticks, and sharper rocks to poke into other animals and eliminate the smart monkeys that won't get with the program. The only four life forms that have ever been happy to see us monkeys appear on the horizon have been Kentucky Bluegrass, the Tiger Mosquito, the Norway Rat, and the Golden Retriever.
And this is NOT going to end well. This once astoundingly beautiful and amazing planet is gonna look a lot less like Earth and a lot more like Mars by the time we've finished making it unsurvivable for ourselves as well as everything else. I'm afraid Douglas Adams pretty much nailed it.
But unlike other living things, we do at least question ourselves in the process of gobbling up more resources.
1. THERE ARE NO OTHER SPECIES THAT GOBBLE UP NONRENEWABLE RESOURCES. Pretty much everything else leaves things better than it found them.
2. So?
A beaver never thinks to file an environmental impact statement before redesigning a perfectly good stream.
Neither does coral before deciding to build the Great Barrier Reef. But I trust both of those animals to do the right thing based mostly on the fact that they're not bipedal monkeys. When a coal fired power plant fills out an environmental impact statement it just checks Yes next to destroying West Virginia, melting Greenland, and dissolving the Great Barrier Reef - but it's OK 'cause it's filled out the environmental impact statement.
I think smart people with good information make good decisions without regulations, but regulations can save some of those who haven't gotten up to speed yet.
I'm a hundred times smarter and more up to speed than the a**holes who run Ridgely are now or will be in a hundred years. In REAL aviation there's a REGULATION that the weak link at the tug has to be heavier than the one at the glider. In bulls*** USHGA aviation there's a RECOMMENDATION that the tug's weak link be a hundred pounds heavier than the one at the glider. Ridgely's gonna use a lighter weak link up front just 'cause they CAN. I can make all the good decisions I want and those scumbag shits are still gonna turn a routine tow into a fatality for me - or my nephew - just 'cause they CAN.
I need to be able to DEMAND that provide me with a safe tow and to pick up the phone to the FAA and have their asses SHUT DOWN and their ratings revoked when they don't. And regulation is the ONLY THING that'll ever get those incompetent negligent bastards up to speed.
So it's just a matter of degrees.
NOT WHEN MY LIFE IS DEPENDENT UPON SOMEONE ELSE. You do it right or you flip burgers or make license plates.
I don't mind pushing that barrier back and forth with people of good intentions, and I think that's how the best solutions are achieved.
Good intentions. Donnell. Road to Hell. Lauren Tjaden is the nicest person on the planet and oozes good intentions.
I'll take an ounce of competence over a ton of good intentions every time. And the hang gliding establishment hasn't had EITHER in its entire existence.
Warren,
To my defense for defending Matt in that previous quote you posted...
I wasn't quoting you defending Matt. I was quoting you quoting Davis defending Matt. You're totally off the hook.
My contention, as was Matt's was that for first time prospective pilots a full blown aero tandem was just too much data to take in and process at one time.
That's probably right. One of the coolest things I've done in my life was to solo a plane. The first time I got to hook into a hang glider I soloed it. I was the Pilot In Command of an aircraft from takeoff at the top of a fifty foot dune to the landing on my wheels at the bottom. I subsequently had three hour flights thousands of feet over the ridge that didn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of holding a candle to that one. I'm positive that a half mile high aerotow with someone else letting me play with the stick for a while where I couldn't do any damage would've been a relative yawn.
Matt's got some stuff right. Davis has got some stuff right. But in aviation 40 percent doesn't cut it. 99.9 percent totally sucks and if someone refuses to fix the 0.1 percent he goes on my enemies list.
Most can't admit that our illegal, immoral wars, based on lies, kill millions and destroys countries, including ours.
I mostly hate the Taliban and I gotta admit that, while I wasn't happy about a massive first strike on them, I wasn't opposed to going in for a surgical number on Bin Laden. I'm at the point where I'm not even sure that would've been all that great an idea even if we had handled it with some degree of competence. Pat Tillman (no relation - I hope and the evidence would strongly suggest) emerged as one of my biggest heroes in the whole clusterfuck.
Maybe they fear an about face now would be seen as admission of liability for past practice?
Sadly, the bottom line is only the dollar?
That's exactly how this bastard is operating. He keeps everybody on dangerously understrength weak links so he doesn't hafta recall dangerously underpowered releases.
The self described scientific genius Davis Straub...
Davis is an evil idiot and I want no association with him on anything. But we ARE roasting the planet and it terrifies and depresses me. We ARE seeing mass extinction NOW.
Enquiring minds want to know... it's the scientific method, afterall.
Why bother when it's so much easier to keep locking threads?
Were you Freedomspyder a couple of years ago?
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