The configuration you describe sounds totally doable. For extra speed and pitch control a small portion of the mains of the PG style harness could be routed through a portion of curved tubing as well to allow more pull in as well.....
Great advice, But what really stands out to me is the fact that a Hang Glider pilot DID fly into a wall and lived to post it..Because there WAS a hole in the wall.......That is what I am considering this morning... building a hole in the wall.....a kickstarter campaign to finance a Hang Gliding company devoted to testing and designing safety items for hang gliding....."hole in the wall Rogallo safe splat inc." Has this been one? I cant remember anyone stepping forward to perform actual development and testing of safety equipment for hang gliding. The company would be a continuation of what we have all done together here online with the goal being to produce well engineered, thoroughly tested and proven product to increase hang gliding safety in both prone and Suprone.... Every industry has companies set up for such purposes. Why not hang gliding? WE NEED such a company and I need a job...so.... I like the flybar I invented, but it needs to be developed before it is put into production and the crash potential needs to be explored......I like the "restraint line" ideas we came up with also but those ideas obviously needs to be more thoroughly and professionally tested as well, in real conditions with Piezo meters gathering solid Data. Yep....Why should I just rig a half a** zip line and do such things for free? I am going to work up a kick starter campaign for a hang gliding safety company. It doesn't hurt to try and It would be a great way to draw attention to the US Hawks and the work everyone here on the safe splat thread has done to improve the safety of our sport I already have one product with "patent pending" that needs developed......other products would follow. Such a company would, of course, take the development of wheels and skids to a whole new level.
I like the thought of the US Hawks Hang Gliding Association being the, "GO TO," place for safety issues. If other websites tried to compete for the position how could that be bad for hang gliding pilots? USHPA, it seems to me, has for liability and insurance purposes, not promoted open source safety discussions.
Look to NASCAR for high speed impact survivability. We don't crash at anywhere near those speeds! If hang gliding did for flight safety what NASCAR has done for racing survivability, we could have a dynamically invigorated sport. And I suspect it is not that big of a challenge, considering what has been learned in the past few years.
I cant remember anyone stepping forward to perform actual development and testing of safety equipment for hang gliding.
Oh, yeah, many things have been tried. The biggest advance has been flying prone in tail impacts. But seriously, if the greatest of safety equipment was developed, I doubt anyone would use it. The lure of hang gliding seems in great part to be its simplicity. Even more so with paragliding. I've always believed the real high-tech safety device missing from our sport is airbags.
Rick Masters wrote:The lure of hang gliding seems in great part to be its simplicity.
Agreed....so we must keep the solutions simple. So simple we would use them ourselves. I have ideas in this regard I have not yet put forward that I would love to explore for real and not just talk about. This would require funding. I am going to gear my "kickstarter" campaign to appeal to all aviation minded individuals and not just the hang gliding crowd. I am going to try and sell to the general aviation public that such a company is needed. If the kickstarter campaign succeeds....how fun....if it does not....oh well... I have fifteen flights now in the suprone with flybar configuration. I am finally getting comfortable flying this way and doing things I had previously only felt comfortable doing in the prone position. my next footage will show suprone flying none of us have ever seen before. All the suprone footage to date has only shown a pilot staying nice and level....taking it easy....we have never seen footage of a suprone pilot diving for speed, doing steep turns close to terra firma and mild aerobatics. The reason I suppose is that the traditional suprone position has not given a pilot a solid sense of full control over the aircraft.... I am experiencing what I will term...adequate control....totally adequate.... Not as much as prone...but far more control than I have seen in any previous suprone footage.... I am having a blast now flying suprone with the flybar....it just took some getting used to.... The season up here in the NW on the wetside of the mountains is pretty much shut down for the winter so I am making trips to the east side of the mountains to test the flybar at Eagle Butte near the tri-cities area I am experimenting with new camera angles and camera mounts that better showcase the device I look forward to sharing.
Bill Cummings wrote:I like the thought of the US Hawks Hang Gliding Association being the, "GO TO," place for safety issues. If other websites tried to compete for the position how could that be bad for hang gliding pilots? USHPA, it seems to me, has for liability and insurance purposes, not promoted open source safety discussions.
I totally agree....and a big thank you again to Joe F. for starting this thread topic....my personal feeling is this thread is not even close to "over" until such ideas are a functional reality.....especially if I can secure funds for a "safety equipment company" for hang gliding.....The brainstorming will have just begun. I see new basetube designs, new downtube designs, new A-frame structures such as Rick outlined.....I see a lot that can be done to improve safety and still maintain simplicity. I must confess the greatest improvements to safety would come if the suprone position is adopted as being within the confines of the A-frame "roll cage" possesses the most crash protection potential... Being within the A-frame with an additional bar in front of us provides solid locations to mount airbag type protection if that is the simplest answer. So that is what I am doing now...proving to myself that the suprone with flybar is a viable alternative. I wasn't so sure for the first ten flights or so. I admit I was nervous for the first few flights and had to tell my foot to stop shaking .... but my confidence is growing as I am gaining new skill, learning new techniques, and finding myself cozy and comfortable in suprone.
If hang gliding did for flight safety what NASCAR has done for racing survivability, we could have a dynamically invigorated sport. And I suspect it is not that big of a challenge, considering what has been learned in the past few years.
I've always believed the real high-tech safety device missing from our sport is airbags.
Imagine an airbag similar to this being incorporated into the harness and being virtually transparent to the pilot (except when needed in a crash).
Modeling and Optimization of Airbag Helmets for Preventing Head Injuries in Bicycling Kurt, M., Laksari, K., Kuo, C. et al. Ann Biomed Eng (2016). doi:10.1007/s10439-016-1732-1 Abstract Bicycling is the leading cause of sports-related traumatic brain injury. Most of the current bike helmets are made of expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam and ultimately designed to prevent blunt trauma, e.g., skull fracture. However, these helmets have limited effectiveness in preventing brain injuries. With the availability of high-rate micro-electrical-mechanical systems sensors and high energy density batteries, a new class of helmets, i.e., expandable helmets, can sense an impending collision and expand to protect the head. By allowing softer liner medium and larger helmet sizes, this novel approach in helmet design provides the opportunity to achieve much lower acceleration levels during collision and may reduce the risk of brain injury. In this study, we first develop theoretical frameworks to investigate impact dynamics of current EPS helmets and airbag helmets—as a form of expandable helmet design. We compared our theoretical models with anthropomorphic test dummy drop test experiments. Peak accelerations obtained from these experiments with airbag helmets achieve up to an 8-fold reduction in the risk of concussion compared to standard EPS helmets. Furthermore, we construct an optimization framework for airbag helmets to minimize concussion and severe head injury risks at different impact velocities, while avoiding excessive deformation and bottoming-out. An optimized airbag helmet with 0.12 m thickness at 72 ± 8 kPa reduces the head injury criterion (HIC) value to 190 ± 25 at 6.2 m/s head impact velocity compared to a HIC of 1300 with a standard EPS helmet. Based on a correlation with previously reported HIC values in the literature, this airbag helmet design substantially reduces the risks of severe head injury up to 9 m/s. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10439-016-1732-1
Air Bag Bike Helmets Show Promise Against Concussion NEUROSCIENCE NEWS OCTOBER 4, 2016 Summary: Researchers report a new type of bike helmet that features air bag technology shows promise in preventing concussions.
Source: Stanford.
Stanford bioengineer David Camarillo knows all too well that bicycling is the leading cause of sports- and activity-related concussion and brain injury in the United States. He’s had two concussions as the result of bicycling accidents. While he doesn’t doubt that wearing a helmet is better than no helmet at all, Camarillo thinks that traditional helmets don’t protect riders as well as they could.
“Foam bike helmets can and have been proven to reduce the likelihood of skull fracture and other, more severe brain injury,” said Camarillo, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford. “But, I think many falsely believe that a bike helmet is there to protect against a concussion. That’s not true.”
Knowing what he does about traditional bike helmets, Camarillo, whose lab works on understanding and preventing concussion, decided to test a new type of helmet that is starting to be available in some European countries. The results are included in the Sept. 27 edition of Annals of Biomedical Engineering.
Reduced acceleration
The helmet Camarillo tested comes in a soft pocket worn around the neck. It pops up, like an air bag, around a person’s head when it senses a potential collision. It was originally designed to address the fact that people don’t like to wear helmets for aesthetic reasons. The researchers compared this air bag helmet directly to traditional foam bike helmets. Their results were striking.
“We conducted drop tests, which are typical federal tests to assess bicycle helmets, and we found that air bag helmets, with the right initial pressure, can reduce head accelerations five to six times compared to a traditional bicycle helmet,” said Mehmet Kurt, a postdoctoral scholar in the Camarillo Lab.
The drop test consisted of putting the helmets on a dummy head containing accelerometers and dropping it, neck-side up, from various heights onto a metal platform. The head form was tilted at two different angles, simulating hits to the crown and the side of the head. Researchers dropped the helmets from as low as 0.8 meters to as high as two meters and measured the linear acceleration of the helmet as it struck the ground.
A crucial caveat
Camarillo said that the large size of the air bag helmet compared to foam bike helmets is the likely source of its success. Being larger, it can also be softer, allowing for a more cushioned fall. However, this cushioning also has a potential downside. In the testing, the air bag helmet was pre-inflated and the researchers maximized the pressure of the air inside the helmet before each drop in order to get these results.
“As our paper suggests, although air bag helmets have the potential to reduce the acceleration levels that you experience during a bicycle accident, it also suggests that the initial pressure that your air bag helmet has is very critical in reducing these acceleration levels,” Kurt said.
Without the maximum amount of air, the air bag helmet could bottom out, causing the head to hit the ground with much more force than if it were wearing a traditional foam helmet. In current versions of the air bag helmet, a chemical process triggers expansion, which doesn’t seem to guarantee maximum air pressure.
Linear acceleration and concussion
In this study the researchers measured linear acceleration of a head upon impact, which can tell us about risk of skull fracture and head injury. It does not directly relate to risk for concussion. Concussion is a rapidly evolving area of research but experts currently think that concussion may be related to angular stretching of the brain, which is more likely caused by a twisting motion rather than linear motion.
“There are many theories as to why concussion happens, but the predominant one is that, as your head rotates very quickly, the soft tissue within your brain contorts and, essentially, what you get is a stretching of the axons, which are the wiring of the brain,” Camarillo said.
The drop test used in this study is currently the standard test for bicycle helmets. Although testing the abilities of the helmets to reduce rotational forces would better tell us how they could protect against concussion, Camarillo said that, given the large advantage of the air bag helmet in this research, there is a good chance it would reduce the likelihood of concussion compared to a foam helmet.
Better helmet testing
The air bag helmet is not available in the United States but is sold in some European countries. It’s a relatively new innovation and, by comparison, helmet standards and testing are very far behind.
“If our research and that of others begins to provide more and more evidence that this air bag approach might be significantly more effective, there will be some major challenges in the U.S. to legally have a device available to the public,” Camarillo said.
Image shows an alzheimer's brain. This is Mehmet Kurt, a postdoctoral scholar in the Camarillo Lab at Stanford, setting up a drop test of the air bag bicycle helmet. NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Kurt Hickman. Even for conventional foam helmets, the standard testing doesn’t address some elements that science indicates matter when it comes to brain injury and head trauma, including assessment of rotational forces and drop tests of parts of the helmet other than the crown. The air bag helmet would raise additional testing issues, including the fact that helmets are generally tested on a head dummy without a neck, which couldn’t wear the air bag helmet.
Future air bag helmet research
Next steps for the air bag helmet include testing how it affects rotational accelerations and forces on the head during impact and how the helmet could reduce tissue-level strains in the brain. The researchers also want to more closely investigate the bottoming out weakness of this helmet type, dropping it from greater heights and seeing how this air cushioning holds up.
It’s also their intention to work at making this helmet smarter. It already expands when it senses a likely impact but they want it to be able to predict the severity of the impact and compensate accordingly.
ABOUT THIS NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH ARTICLE Additional authors of this paper are Calvin Kuo and Kaveh Laksari of Stanford University and Gerald A. Grant of Stanford’s School of Medicine. Camarillo is also a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute.
Funding: The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; Thrasher Research Fund; David and Lucile Packard Foundation; and Child Health Research Institute Transdisciplinary Initiatives Program.
Source: James Beltran – Stanford Image Source: This NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Kurt Hickman. Original Research: Abstract for “Modeling and Optimization of Airbag Helmets for Preventing Head Injuries in Bicycling” by Mehmet Kurt, Kaveh Laksari, Calvin Kuo, Gerald A. Grant, and David B. Camarillo in Annals of Biomedical Engineering. Published online September 27 2016 doi:10.1007/s10439-016-1732-1
CITE THIS NEUROSCIENCENEWS.COM ARTICLE MLAAPACHICAGO Stanford. “Air Bag Bike Helmets Show Promise Against Concussion.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 4 October 2016. http://neurosciencenews.com/air-bag-helmet-concussion-5205/ ------------------------------------------
My suggestion for the US Hawks BOD is to send a simple letter to the researchers at Stanford offering their assistance. Rick Masters
“We conducted drop tests, which are typical federal tests to assess bicycle helmets, and we found that air bag helmets, with the right initial pressure, can reduce head accelerations five to six times compared to a traditional bicycle helmet
My suggestion for the US Hawks BOD is to send a simple letter to the researchers at Stanford offering their assistance. Rick Masters
I would love to be a Part of the US HAWKS " Hang Gliding Safety think Tank"....I would be on here more often but the FlyBar is keeping me pretty Busy. I have 26 flights on it now in all conditions except mid summer thermals in Chelan...Flown it at three different site....I am convinced....there are no problem except top speed, but as I am learning suprone and reviewing footage I realize I am not even using the center portion to "pull in" with. I am using my heel....its effortless, holds me very stable in the transition between rear handles and the front bar (I couldn't have done this in Supine, or "under" the bar) I have already made another bar that just goes straight across. I think it is in some of this footage. I am going to make a "belly bar" version of the Fenison FlyBar to see if I can get up to full "prone" flying speeds flying Suprone. The front portion in its present configuration is doing its job very well of not allowing any twisting of the DT's to take place no matter how much I'm cranking on those handles....VERY STRONG. However, on the second version I did add a weak link to each side where the handles meet the rear edge of The DT's (so the handles will break away before any undue pressure is put on the DT's even in a worse case "Tumble" scenario. Seemed like a good idea....
I LOVE the idea of the cyclist airbag helmut, along with a tried and tested rear restraint line that has been proven to WORK!... zipline testing is not "over"....I want to "test" all this stuff, FlyBAR included. HOw else could I develop the crash potential of the flybar without a zipline like device, but with piezo meter, cameras...G-meters...the works...and have the DATA professionally analyzed? If the FAA had been responsible for the sport of hang gliding all this time I bet things... 1. They would have required all accident DATA BE carefully compiled and studied... 2. They would have supplied Grants for Studies to be done on how to improve our safety record.. 3. They would have REQUIRED ALL pilots to fly with adequate Wheel....I find it ironic that only two thing are required at most sites..a parachute and a helmut, when the one thing that could prevent most of the "sudden stops" from happening that require helmets are wheels....then they would be a "law" just like seat belts....and ALL pilots would have to fly with them, so nobody would be suffering a performance "ding" really....anyway....I'm rambling....later...sj
by reluctantsparrow » Tue Nov 01, 2016 9:40 am 
.... but my confidence is growing as I am gaining new skill, learning new techniques, and finding myself cozy and comfortable in suprone.
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