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I'm in San Diego this week so my goal is to spend more time flying and less time typing for now.
No problem, I've always been in favor of people getting into the air whenever it's going up.
Without reviewing the topic, I think we've learned we need people at the helm who are better than "the stupidest person ever to put a hand on a tiller".
No, we most assuredly did not.
1. We already knew that six thousand years ago.
2. The ship was not driven onto the rocks because the crew members were stupid.
3. Each and every one of us is the the stupidest person ever to put a hand on a tiller on occasion.
We had regulations in place to guard against and compensate for predictable and universal human stupidity and they were neither enforced nor followed.
Most of us fly with and are sometimes required to fly with helmets and parachutes primarily to guard against and compensate for predictable human stupidity - and it's hard to argue that both shouldn't be mandatory for aerobatics competitions.
My short answer is that I think we (society) should provide lots of information about what we feel is safe and what we feel isn't.
For the purposes of this exercise "we (society)" is a very small and odd branch of aviation and there's absolutely no goddam "feel" about it. This is about what everyone with half a brain or better - somewhere around one or two percent of the participants - bloody well KNOWS in no uncertain terms is safe or certifiably insane.
Verifying that you're hooked in immediately prior to stepping off a two hundred foot cliff is safe. Assuming you're hooked in based upon what you think you remember doing thirty seconds ago is certifiably insane. But what do we teach?
Cragin Shelton - 2005/10/03
I remarked that 'you are not hooked in until after the hang check.'
flyin_canuck - 2011/03/01
Nothing creates carnage like declaring a spot landing contest.
But what does USHGA train and FORCE people to do to get ratings?
We KNOW that every time you take a hand off the basetube within striking distance of the ground your chances of killing yourself go up by a factor of ten thousand, or, on tow, fifty thousand - but what does USHGA FORCE people to do during landing approaches and where does Wallaby put its release actuators?
Ann Fawkes - 2011/03/02
Western Europe
If the conditions are such that you need to choose between a controlled wheel landing or a risky foot landing, go for the wheels and try the foot landing in better conditions. Landing unharmed is your first priority.
Not in USHGA's book. It doesn't matter so much if you get killed on a landing. What matters is that you prioritized getting down on your feet all the way to the bloody end. I can name you two people killed by that mind-set in the past sixteen months.
But I don't think society should be picking up the tabs for nearly as much as we do. We've become a "nanny state" and we haven't figured out yet that we (as a society) can not now (nor never could) afford to provide the best possible care for everyone who does something stupid.
So what do we do? Do we leave Bill Floyd in a crumpled heap for the gulls and crabs to start working on while he's still got a faint pulse 'cause we've made a spot call that his was an unacceptable level of stupidity?
What about the uninsured kid I'm inventing that he landed on? Shouldn't have been there 'cause he shoulda known that hand gliders are more worried about having their parachutes repacked every six months than they are about flying with them and they never check their sidewires?
Who said anything about the best possible care? I'm talking about keeping him alive, not chocolate mints on his pillow every morning. And sometimes the best possible care is the only kind worth doing - all or nothing.
Wouldn't it be a lot less expensive, cruel, and morally vexing if Bill's nanny state agent handed him a hundred dollar ticket and one month suspension of his license for flying without a chute and/or failing to preflight the wing? EVERYBODY would be thrilled with the outcome, relatively speaking, Bill would get back in the air a year sooner, and we'd have an extra quarter million dollars we could use to cure a half dozen kids who got leukemia through no fault of their own.
I have a lot of faith and respect for Joe...
I haven't weighed in either for the same reasons. And I don't have the time to do the background work to make an informed decision. If you put a gun to my head I'd go Joe 'cause I know Joe and I know Davis, but I suspect I'd find some gray if I dug deeply enough in an issue like this.
I like what I'm doing 'cause it doesn't take any brains or deep thinking and I can keep people from getting crippled and killed. A bent pin will lock up, a straight one won't. Black and white, two plus two. Lotsa bang for the buck.
If you can point to someone who takes the other side and bring them here for a debate, that will certainly help me feel more confident that I know what's going on.
WHAT OTHER SIDE? THERE IS NO FREAKING OTHER SIDE. In order for there to be sides you'd hafta find somebody who'd actually read either the existing SOPs or the proposed revisions (preferably both) and that person DOES NOT EXIST. Just finding a hang glider pilot who can partially comprehend a written sentence without three or four roflcats in it is a major challenge.
If you want another side get Jack and Davis over here and give them lockdown and banning privileges.
The problem with this forum now (and an even bigger problem with your new forum) is that there aren't enough people on here to get that kind of discussion.
bulls***. You need TWO people who want to have a discussion for a discussion. At Kite Strings we've got four people engaging in discussions. These are infinitely better discussions than the ones I've engaged in with four thousand members, 99 percent of whom are a**holes. At Kite Strings we're all in agreement with two plus two equals four and we're occupied with discussing how best to use that equation in our designs and procedures instead of arguing with Tracy, Head Trauma, and the rest of the two plus two equals whatever I say 'cause I fly more than you crowd.
I just don't know enough (and maybe don't have enough need to know enough) to do that for you.
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.
If you wanna head/build a national hang gliding organization without a reasonable understanding of towing then you better move to Switzerland 'cause the overwhelmingly vast proportion of this nation is too flat for anything else. Hang gliding pretty much evolved from water skiers with flat kites - like Bills Bennett and Moyes - to begin with and if you don't understand the dynamics of towing you probably don't understand the dynamics of free flying either. Donnell dug us a real big hole in the early Eighties 'cause he didn't understand the dynamics of free flying and how easily they translated to towing.
And I keep trying to tell you that pretty much everything you really need to know is ten-year-old kid with kite stuff. But you're not engaging me on it or asking any questions so I can't walk you through it. Read a paragraph and if there's something you don't understand or believe to be erroneous I'll happily spend a month with you to reach a resolution - in your favor if absolutely necessary.
I tried to do that right out of the gates with the HGAA and it quickly became a power grab by Jack Axaopoulos.
The framers of the US Constitution wrote it with checks and balances to deal with Jack and Davis. The communists assumed there weren't people like Jack and Davis so they ended up with Stalin in pretty short order.
So I think we'll need to come up with a "constitution" to keep that from happening again before I hand over power of the US Hawks to an unruly mob.
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.
You got one. I can freakin' bury you with credentials and references. Use him. If he turns out to be a whack job like Jack says you can have him killed before you relinquish power to a constitutional government.
But, again, my nephew isn't going into any branch of aviation controlled by a democracy of pilots. I'd be a thousand times more comfortable with him slamming F-18s down on carrier decks than spot landing hang gliders at Ridgely 'cause that culture isn't controlled by a bunch of SH*THEADS with no qualifications beyond being able to afford a couple of Dragonflies and the ability to fly them - it's controlled by a century's worth of evolution controlled by physicists and engineers with degrees and accountability.
So maybe we should start establishing constitutional foundations like "It takes two hands to fly a hang glider." before we decide whether or not Hawaii counts as part of the United States with respect to the issue of presidential birthplaces.
The big question that will determine a lot of our structure is what do we want this organization to be?
Fer starters and before anything else get's rolling... 100.000 percent COMPETENT. We knock a zero off the end we needlessly kill one person in ten thousand. We knock off two we're back down to USHGA.
Will it be a "political party" for hang gliding interests in an increasingly paragliding world?
You deal with them on the ridge, I'll take care of them on the tow strip.
Will it be an advisory body for hang gliding safety?
Hang glider pilots in the air - just like automobile drivers on the road - need something considerably more menacing than "advice". We can and do kill ourselves, our passengers, our students, other planes, and innocent bystanders.
Will it be an independent organization providing ratings...
I fervently hope so. And I hope the requirements are as consistent and brutal as the ones for the certification of the freakin' gliders we're gonna put people on. "Wow! Did you see the dive recovery results on the new Wills Wing U3! Pulled out NINETY PERCENT of the time!" But an eighty on the written for the Hang Two is pretty damn good.
Will it be a bunch of outcast crackpots talking only to themselves?
Probably. But as long as we're learning something and somebody's talking to somebody it's better than nothing and there's a spark of hope.
But "better" has many dimensions, and we may agree on some and disagree on others.
Then let's get the knock down / drop outs underway and reach some resolutions.
What do you want me to do about it?
Engage me. (That's legal in lotsa states now.)
Call it something like "Request for Comments: Proposed US Hawks Towing Policy".
I did that for about three months at Peter Birren's:
"skysailingtowing - THE TOWING LIST for all towed gliders"
except, it goes without saying, for Tad, before the brain damaged little shitt pulled the plug on me. Seven hundred members including some USHGA Towing Committee with towing as the uniting interest - and ya know what I got in the way of substantive comments?
Looking at Hawks people and extrapolating, how much response do you think I'm gonna get here, especially when one of my top prospects is Sam who won't even bother reading, let alone responding to, an eight sentence answer to a question of his 'cause it's too "long winded"?
I posted the link to that documentation here over three weeks ago and so far I've had about the one percent of the zero I got from Peter's cult that I've grown accustomed to.
I spent the better part of four days on the road getting to and from Lookout 'cause Matt invited me down there for a discussion of the issues but that motherfucker couldn't be bothered to spend the twenty minutes it woulda taken to read them either and was only interested in using me and my load tester to find out what his release and weak links would do like I was one of his employees.
Nobody - including/especially the members of the Towing Committee - reads or makes any attempt to comply with the existing regulations, why would anyone expect anyone to give anything else the most cursory glance?
Publish it in an organized manner so people can find their way through it. If you do that, then I promise I'll read it and post my comments.
IT'S BEEN PUBLISHED FOR YEARS.
http://www.energykitesystems.net/Lift/h ... index.html
SOPs and Guidelines. About the equivalent of thirty pages - A LOT of which is empty space and just pulled from the existing USHGA stuff that nobody ever reads.
Finally, I hope you don't mind this comment, but I think it might help you.
Nope, I never mind any constructive or well intentioned comment.
I would guess that 10% of all people are highly offended by foul language.
1. And yet from everything I've ever heard the fiber optics of the internet are just barely able no support the weight of all the porn that flows through them.
2. Foul is a subjective adjective. I don't consider calling Matt a motherfucker to be foul language 'cause my identification of him as such is accurate (Asterisk - If he were a literal motherfucker I'd never call him that - I'd hafta come up with something else.) and will decrease the reader's probability of ending up as a mangled corpse at the base of an escarpment or just off the side of a runway.
This:
The new GT aerotow release, new as of July 11th 2009, is designed to be used with a V bridle and a 13O-pound green stripe Dacron tournament fishing line weak link. At this time it is not recommended to use this release with a higher value weak link.
I consider to be totally OBSCENE language 'cause that's exactly the kind that has gotten people killed and will continue to do so.
And I'd guess that of those 50% (highly + moderately), they all tend to be dismissive of people who use that language.
I'm totally OK with that 'cause I'm always thinking about the gene pool. These are the people who are totally horrified by the four letter words in "Saving Private Ryan" but pretty much totally OK with the concept of people turning flame throwers on each other.
Now if you really and truly want to change things, then you've got to realize that you're only hurting your own credibility with about 50% of the people for something as simple as your choice in words.
Ignoring the fact that there's a lot of people in this sport I wanna see dead... You've invented some numbers and are now drawing conclusions from them as if you were working from actual data. I would suggest that hit counters on my threads all over the glider fora indicate the precise opposite.
Now I can imagine a response that says "people shouldn't be offended", or "people who are offended don't matter".
Yeah, I'm good with either/both of those.
But whether that's true or not, it doesn't help any future Shane's to have anyone "turned off" or "put off" by your language.
Shane had just come back from two years of saving souls in Guatemala (I'm guessing on behalf of a religious cult that functions exactly like USHGA - question the leadership on anything and your a** is gone, for the rest of your life or all eternity, whichever comes last) instead of listening to me so I could save his life. So the next Shane can think a little about what kind of person he's best off paying attention to.
So I'm asking you to think about whether it's more important for you to build the support to actually make a change or if it's more important to spit out a bunch of cuss words that lose a good percentage of your potential audience.
Again, the ASSUMPTION thing. You always need data. Kinda like your ASSUMPTION that evolution inevitably leads to something "better" while all the data is indicating the precise opposite in a lot of relevant scenarios. We tow people were in pretty good shape with the Brooks Bridle in 1981 and now Davis Releases are multiplying like Asian Carp closing in on the Great Lakes.
), but in the end there were too many good lines and I was too tired to keep track. There are many places where we differ, and we could run down those topics, but I don't think they'll get us anywhere. So instead I'd like to focus on something concrete. You wrote:
