(I'll bet you didn't see that coming)
No, doesn't surprise me in the least.
Really, I think criticism is great.
That was mostly criticism for being human. There's very little in that post that I jumped on you for that I haven't done in spades myself. But when we're trying to forge an organization - or even a model of an organization - that's dealing with life and death issues we can't afford to be human.
With 3 years in the Army, you can bet that I've heard it all.
Thanks for helping me further crystallize a little thinking. Lotsa correlations between the hang gliding and the military.
We're using very dangerous toys to complete very dangerous missions in very dangerous environments and lotsa people get very mangled and killed and lotsa people end up damaged by shell shock - I mean battle fatigue - I mean post-traumatic stress disorder.
I've been in and around hang gliding over ten times as long as you were in the military. Let's compare notes...
I can recall personally known... lotsa broken arms, a lost eye, a broken neck, a paralyzed from the waist down, a couple of limb amputations, nine real serious crashes from which people returned, six real serious crashes from which people didn't return, a dozen kills, a couple of regular suicides, and one murder-suicide. And I can expand a bit if we open it up to tugs, ultralights, and paragliders.
And I've been stretchered off the mountain on one occasion from which I fully recovered and have been helped off the mountain on another occasion which has left me with a somewhat minor permanent disability and the minor but constant pain to go with it.
So what have you got?
The songs we used to sing on marches would curdle the language you've used.
So maybe people who deal with life and death levels of responsibility have better things to worry about than using asterisks to describe situations in which sh*t's hitting fans.
But remember that some people are turned off by it.
FINE. Phuck 'em. They are more than welcome to not read anything I say and I don't particularly want those sorts of people sticking around to reproduce too much anyway.
So you're only hurting your ability to reach a wider audience with some of your language.
Assumption with absolutely nothing to support it. George Carlin reached a wider - and BETTER - audience than some standup you never heard of who woulda met with Jerry Falwell's approval.
You're also handing ammunition to anyone who wants to bury these discussions ... and this entire forum.
One of our members participated in the sabotaging of one of my threads which might have prevented our most recent towing death. Another has advised against complying with the most important preflight procedure defined by the world's largest glider manufacturer. People who have omitted that procedure HAVE died BECAUSE they omitted that procedure. Deal with that and then get back to me about how I'm giving ammunition to the forces of evil with four letter words.
I know that nothing is 100% safe or certain.
bulls***. I can take a length one inch of Dacron webbing, sit in front of the TV for a while with a needle and a spool of dental floss, and fashion a hang strap that'll break a factory fresh glider about four times over. Maybe I can't tell you exactly where it's gonna blow but I absolutely CAN tell you that I can turn your glider to junk before the strap's even thinking about breaking a sweat.
So we can't just refrain from everything with a non-zero probability of death or injury.
That is NOT what I'm about. I'm about sending you up with equipment such that IF you get injured or killed there is ZERO probability that it'll be 'cause your hang strap failed or your release jammed. I've done that.
Question: What's your estimated probability of a serious or fatal injury during a typical Wallaby tandem flight?
Let's call it one in a million. That's way too generous but, what the hell, it's an easy number (like one G for a weak link).
Let's start with some numbers (even estimates) and then we can evaluate my decision to fly with 100% trust in their standard procedures.
Kinda like Warren's gonna say... If you fly with one hundred percent trust in someone's "standard" procedures based upon the number of people they haven't been killing lately you're out of your freakin' mind. You're not a pilot, you're not an engineer, you're the latest member of a religious cult. Pilots and engineers are eternal skeptical pessimists.
OK?
NO. IT'S *NOT* OK. It's not OK 'cause that double fatality WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED if Malcolm hadn't been using stupid shitrigged equipment which twenty years ago before it ever got off the ground we knew would fail and violates the crap out of existing standards and regulations.
I've been watching tow crashes for thirty years and I defy you to show me one in which there were half competent people at both ends of the string using optimal equipment.
The BHPA people are morons but here's what even THEY have to say on tandem aerotowing:
On tow the Pilot in Command must have his hand actually on the release at all times. 'Near' the release is not close enough! When you have two hands completely full of locked-out glider, taking one off to go looking for the release guarantees that your situation is going to get worse before it gets better.
Gregg McNamee - 1996/12
To actuate the primary release the pilot does not have to give up any control of the glider. (Common sense tells us that the last thing we want to do in an emergency situation is give up control of the glider in order to terminate the tow.)
If your system requires you to take your hand off the control bar to actuate the release it is not suitable.
Tom Peghiny, Manned Kiting - 1974
Never take your hands off the bar.
Go ahead. Argue against that. Tell me why that's not mandated on BOTH sides of the Atlantic for BOTH tandem and solo. We've been saying this for forty years. But where are these a**holes putting the release actuators?
We're not gonna kill the two people on the tandem once every million tows 'cause the pilot got hit with something too nasty to cope with - we're gonna kill them cause he got hit with something too nasty to cope with with one hand.
But safety is largely statistical in nature. If one tow system has a 1% failure rate...
This is bulls***. This is saying that aviation safety is nothing but a dice roll and all we're using our brains for is to keep our skulls from collapsing. You're not looking at WHAT'S CAUSING THE FAILURES.
Joe Greblo teaches foot launching in compliance with USHGA regulations which state that a hook-in check be performed JUST PRIOR TO LAUNCH. The hook-in failure rate of people so trained is so low that it's probable that no one has ever been injured.
Rob McKenzie teaches a certifiably insane approach in flagrant violation of the regulations and his hang check crowd have failure rates of - I'd guess - about seventy percent over a flying career and those people get embarrassed, bruised, mangled, and killed all the time.
If the release actuator is on the downtube the fatality rate is gonna go up by thirtyfold over folk with the release actuator on the basetube.
Idiots who fly with light weak links have crash rates ASTRONOMICALLY higher than people who fly with heavy or no weak links.
Same goes for people who routinely (try to) land on their feet versus those who typically roll their landings in.
By the way, let me make it clear that I'm not ready to say that anyone's system is better than anyone else's system.
That's OK, I can handle that just fine. The stuff you were flying with Saturday was dangerous, shitrigged junk...
John Fritsche - 2008/12/12
I haven't towed in several years. Do people still use those (IMO, stupid) releases that involve bicycle brakes?
...and everybody's known it since the beginning of time.
Despite Tad's confidence (thanks Tad)...
That's not confidence based upon just my say-so and the fact that nobody's been killed on any of my stuff lately. That's confidence based on lotsa homework, engineering standards, bench tests, common sense, and a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
...I know that I don't know enough to say anything about towing safety.
If you don't know now you won't know any better a couple of thousand tows from now. Driving a cab for thirty years won't do shitt for one's understanding of a hydraulic braking system. And growing up in a mud hut with nothing but goats and donkeys around isn't an insurmountable barrier to twelve year old kid being able to understand and perhaps design a better hydraulic braking system.
Those numbers were simply to illustrate that relative safety rates are less important in single samples than they are with many repeated samples.
The glider you're flying was not certified by building a hundred of them, throwing them up into the air, and seeing how often they fell back out of it. It was certified by building ONE prototype based upon decades of well understood principles, ground testing the crap out of it, then throwing it in the air to demonstrate it'll do what the designers were entirely confident it would.
1. I'm assuming you don't question the numbers on an HGMA certified glider.
2. If you ask me my numbers for - let's say - one of my shoulder mounted barrel releases in one point tow configuration I'm gonna be able to tell you that if you fly at 320 pounds you can blow two Gs (the maximum allowable weak link) with a sixteen pound pull.
3. If you call Malcolm and ask him...
...he refused to say, just aggressively stated they never had any problems with their releases, they were fine, goodbye, click.
I would think that that alone would make it pretty easy to make a call between the two of us.
4. If he ever HAD bothered to do his fu**ing job he'd tell you that at that kind of tension the pin would've folded in half and jammed in the barrel and if you wanted to get the pull down to twenty-five pounds you'd hafta drop the tow tension down to a bit under one G.
So far, I've been happy and impressed with what Malcolm has created.
Based on getting in the air real easy, having fun, and not getting killed one time?
I'm soooo inexperienced with towing that I can't even visualize a spinnaker release at all. So I'm really a clean slate. I need to start getting more familiar with towing before I can really contribute anything worth reading.
What the hell does towing have to do with visualizing or understanding a spinnaker shackle?
Towing is flying. Ya know how to fly ya pretty much know how to tow and a Hang Five isn't gonna be able to get any better at it than a Hang Two. (And I know a severely mangled Hang Five who was a few hundred times worse at it than an average Hang Two.)
A spinnaker shackle is - unfortunately and entirely inappropriately - towing equipment. Towing equipment has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with flying. It has only to do with dropping strings under - or not under - loads. There is NOTHING about tow equipment that a person with thirty years of towing experience is gonna be able to understand any better than a grade school kid with none whatsoever.
You wanna visualize a spinnaker shackle? I spent about a billion hours with a tripod and Photoshop to make it real easy for people like you to do that.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/Those photos are organized into three SETS. Go nuts.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/3919079051/http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/3919079055/You tell me how much TOWING EXPERIENCE one needed to identify THAT as a bullet.
You tell me why we're STILL putting THAT BULLET in our cylinders even AFTER we've seen it blow somebody's brains out. Try to make it better than "It only matters one out of every million tows." 'cause that's not gonna hold much water with Robin's family.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aerotowrelease/2796540691/Show me THAT bullet in THAT cylinder.
But then I thought about actually writing a software simulation of both. That got me to thinking about many of the subtle issues like the amount of surface area contacting the barrel (which might affect the friction as it slides), the normal forces, and the coefficients of friction.
1. Phuck all that. Load the goddam thing up to two hundred pounds and try to blow it. If it takes more than 25 IT FLUNKS - PERIOD. And it does take more than 25 - it takes takes over 32. And if it took 25 it would still flunk 'cause you can use a straight pin and blow 350 with 17.
2. Contact area is totally irrelevant. If the coefficient of friction between two materials is X it doesn't matter if the contact area is a square inch or a square foot - the required pull is gonna be exactly the same.
3. All that's important here is mechanical advantage. The bent pin doesn't have any. And any kid who's ever played on a seesaw can understand that.
4. The tension-to-pull relationship is linear - twice the tension, twice the required pull. ('Cept with a Linknife - then things are reversed.)
I was also thinking about the possibility of the "free loop" (if that's what it's called) getting stuck on the wrong side of the straight pin. Is that more or less likely to happen with a curved pin? I don't know, but it's just not that obvious to me .. yet.
If you're a total moron and/or wanna sabotage a straight pin - you CAN. If you're a total moron and/or wanna sabotage a bent pin - you CAN. If you're a total moron and/or wanna sabotage a glider - you CAN (although the manufacturers have done a pretty good job of making that real tough on most of the modern stuff).
We don't have - or need - or want - regulations which make it impossible to fill a Cessna engine crankcase with gasoline. We do have regulations which tend to keep people that fu**ing stupid out of the cockpits.
If you've got an IQ of three or better you can hook up one of my barrel releases in such a manner that it will be physically impossible to have it jam in flight. If you've got an IQ of less than three you shouldn't be flying gliders anyway - you should be flying tugs.
It may be a personal deficiency, but I tend to learn more about things by actually touching them and experimenting with them.
That WOULD get you identified as a freak inside of the hang gliding community but I'm not entirely sure I'd identify it as a personal deficiency. I'm not sayin' one way or the other but it's possible I might have locked myself in my bedroom once or twice with a few spinnaker shackles and barrel releases for some prolonged touching and experimenting sessions. (And that business about going blind is a bunch of horse shitt invented by flight park operators.)
My point with statistics is that I believe if there is a difference, it will be small with respect to the total number of tows that are done.
If you're gonna spin a million chamber cylinder with one round in it, point the revolver at my nephew's head, and pull the trigger you'd better have a WAY better reason than it being statistically so small a problem that it's not worth taking that round out. 'Cause if you don't I'm gonna play statistics with you using a six cylinder revolver with five rounds.
We should work toward ZERO. But part of working toward zero is taking the time to examine the different common practices and even try them with relative safety. That's what I hope to do.
You're too freakin' late. In the early Seventies we had releases that functioned just fine under quadruple digits of tow tension and let you keep both hands on the basetube at all times. But then a bunch of stupid irresponsible a**holes took over the sport, rotted it out from the inside, flooded it with their toxic junk and propaganda, and set up mechanisms to marginalize and silence all critics. The common practices all SUCK.
Mostly, I'm happy to see diverse opinions here, and I'm happy that we can have rational discussions about this.
Diverse opinions or rational discussions? They're mutually exclusive. Pick one.
The only things I despise more that opinions are diverse opinions. We start at two plus two equals four and crush any diverse opinions with a ruthlessness that would horrify an SS officer.
This IS war, people ARE being killed by shitrigged equipment just as dead as they would be by AK-47s and I don't give a rat's a** how low the count or frequency is. And if you're willing to kill someone or even take a chance on killing someone just so you can continue making a buck by selling your shitrigged equipment or save a buck by not replacing it with something safe I've got no problem whatsoever with seeing you stood up in front of a wall - especially if you're Adam, Steve, Matt, or Davis.
I was thinking that it might be good to break this discussion off into a new topic with a more appropriate title so people could find it...
I don't care that much but I don't really see a need. When you start talking tow stuff the different aspects - releases, bridles, weak links, lockouts, stalls, drivers, emergency procedures - are all so interrelated that it's hopeless to try to neatly separate and organize them. And "Davis Straub", "Oz Report", and "Conflict of Interest" - alone or in combination - are all pretty good categories for covering everything that's rotten about hang gliding in general and towing in particular. But I'd be fine with "Jack Axaopoulus" or "Dr. Tracy S. Tillman" if that's what you wanna do.
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