US Hawks Hang Gliding Association

This last Tuesday I had my first flight since Wednesday, June 13th. What makes this recent flight significant is what happened during the flight of June 13th. On that date I had the most serious "bad landing" that I have ever had. This not so good flight took place at a site called Mossy Bank in Bath, NY

There were a few, not too serious bent or broken parts on my glider. That was not bad, as results go. On the other hand (almost literally) I broke my left thumb and knocked myself silly. The old knogen got bounced a little too hard during the landing.

The result is interesting, in that people who quickly arrived at the scene heard me yell to help get the flattened glider (one busted down tube can cause that to happen) up off me. They then told me that I was otherwise fairly nice. Thing is, I don't remember ANY of it! One witness reported that I hit the ground so hard I didn't know I had had an accident. I don't know because I wasn't there - but was! lol

A puzzling aspect of my memory problem includes that I forgot my actions for about 1-2 minutes before I thumped down. I remember clearly making a plan for my landing approach, and except for probably a 1-2 second image of just before ground contact, I don't remember anything else during the last couple of minutes of my flight.

Luckily I had a GPS recording my (3D) track log. With this, a few days later, I looked to see the part of my flight that I could not remember. Ends up I decided to a alter my approach, but I'm not sure why. My best guess is that an odd cross wind situation had developed and air may have actually begun flowing across and down the slope that I had, 5 minutes before, been soaring.

In the last section of my final glide the GPS shows I moved vertically forward about 300 feet while descending 110 feet. (!!!???) Since I'm flying a topless WW Fusion SP 145, this seems a little shy of its typical 11:1 glide ratio - by quite a bit! It was flying with a 3:1 glide ratio! I can't imagine this happening unless there was a down washing wind coming off the hill and seriously degrading my glide. Just before touch down the glider rotated 180 degrees back toward the hill and I am guessing that was a full on stall at about 15 - 20 feet of altitude. This fits with spectators saying that, at the last second, the glider just "fell" to the ground.

It truly sucks having a fairly bad landing and not remembering any of it (except that brief image flash that I think happened just before I thumped down).

The fun (but not really) part was the almost 70 mile helicopter ride to a far off hospital (as opposed to driving me 6 miles to the local facility?). I have another distinct memory of looking up and seeing the "hub" and one blade of the copter's rotor over my head as I was placed inside. Boy, are those helicopter rides expensive!!!!

The worst part of all this was the memory loss (that came and went for a couple days) and persisting effects from my traumatic brain injury. Luckily, I feel like about 90% of "me" is back in fairly good order. And my left thumb is 95% healed. And guess what that means? I can fly again! Yahoo! In fact, I got my first flight in this last Tuesday.


The flight took place at our local site at Hammondsport, NY. And here's my story of the day -


Well, I got air time today. Launched a bit after 3 pm. In two steps I was off and instantly up 10 feet and then very quickly over launch.

It wasn't generally overly windy. I'd put the winds at 12 - 16 mph with an occasional higher gust to roughly 18 mph. There were some decent thermals but also some decent sink with the mix being almost 50/50.

I only flew for 29 minutes because I didn't want to push things on my first flight since my bad landing. But also, I had hit a sink cycle and was steadily going down. I found myself just high enough to shoot for a top landing - rather then temp fate with a church LZ landing attempt. For HGs, it's dangerous down there because of extensive weed overgrowth and the major fields planted with mature corn.

Anyway, my max altitude was 3,338 feet MSL or about 2,238 ft. over the valley and 1,572 ft. over launch. On my first up cycle climb out I got to 520 ft. over take off. During cycle two, I got to 1,010 ft OTO and got to the 1,572 ft. OTO on my third climb out.

Landing was interesting partly because the last time I did it things didn't go so well. But also, today the wind was a bit blustery - more so on the hill tops. And lastly, this was only my 3rd landing approach into this particular top landing field. Our usual one is planted with corn.

I chose to zip back with about 350 ft to burn off. With any top landing I keep my speed up because hitting some choppy air is very likely. Well, today I added just a bit more speed - in case. I found the air to be the most turbulent of any of my other landings there. The choppy air lasted about 20 - 30 seconds and continued down to about 75 - 50 feet above ground level.

This was something I was hoping wouldn't happen, but as I glided to below 50 feet the air became friendly and got smooth as butter. My landing was powder puff perfect. The contrast between the rowdy air coming in, and the very gentle air close to the ground, was striking. Clearly, there are times when this LZ can pose a challenge.

Finally, I didn't feel any discomfort from my mostly healed left hand. I was glad about that, having figured that it was "ready for action".

I also did some moderate repairs to my glider and with the textured air today, I couldn't pick up on anything odd in the glider's handling. I'll be able to feel out more on a smoother (wonder wind type) day.

Well, that's my story! No one else got out to fly, unfortunately.

Till the next good day -

Three to one glide has me guessing you had a good head wind for that 110 foot decent.
Could it have been that the gradient near the ground was so much that as you flew into the slower air you did not have enough speed pulled on and stalled a tip which produced the 180 degree turn?

Before center of mass towing I locked out to the right while fussing with a foot stirrup and not following the tow truck. My memory of the event stopped seconds above the ground.

I remember thinking that this upcoming crash was really going to hurt or never hurt at all. ---As in, “Killed On Impact,” KOI.

I think I beat the ambulance to the scene of the crash by about thirty minutes.

I rung my bell pretty hard and was having trouble staying awake in the emergency room while I had my chin stitched up.

Short term memory was tough for two weeks after that. I never did regain the memory of Impact which I see as a blessing.

Bill,

Thanks for the input!

However, conditions precluded strong winds. The launch is at 410 feet with the main hill hitting just above 500. My last few passes along the ridge were losing altitude due to slacking winds and/or winds more from the west (at a north facing site). Either way, winds weren't more than 10 - 12 mph. The flight began at 5 pm and ended at just before 5:30 pm.

I do think that I effectively entered seriously sinking air on my final approach. I can not exclude rowdy air near the ground from playing a part since I landed "down wind" (south of) a 50 - 60 foot high (highway) railroad overpass.

The "LZ" was a sizable grass strip along the highway. The usual valley LZ was planted in corn.

My plan was to land to the west of the overpass where the highway is much less elevated. I'm not sure why I changed my plan (that's where my memory fails me - and GPS begins). I had two wind "flags" spaced out (by 400 yards) across the alternate LZ strip. I have a feeling that I changed my approach when I saw contradictory readings from them, or simply hit seriously "weird" sinking air. The final stall may have been induced by rotor turbulence down wind of the over pass - or due to serious gradient (or even a freaky tail wind).

The site is known to (now and then) generate strong lift at altitudes as low as 300 feet. It's possible that I may have entered air being sucked horizontally toward such a lifting mass of air - effectively, an unexpected head wind.

The other quirky thing about the site is its odd nature of showing a clear west wind (on both valley and hill indicators) on days when there is no doubt that the prevailing wind is north. I believe that I may have been caught in a transition from prevailing northerly to westerly winds. I have a theory why the westerly winds occur, but have no idea what may trigger a (fairly swift) transition from due north winds to west winds. In fact, I've never seen a "transition" before. I've just shown up to find west winds on an otherwise undeniably north day.

As it is, I know very well to have good speed during final approach on my Fusion, but since I have no memory of what exactly happened, I can't say how things went wrong. That's VERY annoying!

But anyway, the happier story is that I have gotten back into the air after a bit over a 2 1/2 month lay off.

wingspan33 wrote: the happier story is that I have gotten back into the air after a bit over a 2 1/2 month lay off.

,
Sam

With the added details of the site I now am piecing together situations from my flying past that may be possible scenarios to figuring out what lead to the accident.

So I will try, in effect, to reverse engineer a recipe for disaster with the information so far at hand.

Ingredient #1 -- I had been soaring a 475 foot south facing ridge at Lake Pepin on the Mississippi River (Actually just a mile wide spot on the river due to the dam down river.) It was about 5:30 pm and the ridge lift was dieing out.
I sunk out and landed on the beach. My last flight would be a pop start and long tow across and up the river to our camp site. The boat driver handed me my end of the static towline and he headed into the dying breeze to wait for me to shake the glider then he would hit the boat throttle. I shook the glider to signal take-off. The katabatic evening air flow then started to push on the glider from behind.
The boat was getting on plane and I didn’t want to risk hitting the two upper releases and the bottom base tube release for fear the lower one would release and the upper ones might not release and make a twisted pile of aluminum and sailcloth wrapped around a keel hauled pilot.

Instead I shook the glider again and I heard the motor RPM move higher.
Again I shook the glider for even more speed before the slack came out of the rope. When the rope went tight the boat was still too slow to overcome my tailwind. Due to my drivers quick action pulling the release at the boat end of the towline he saved both the glider and me from any injury. (Everything did get wet!)

Might katabatic flow at 5:30 pm be one ingredients in the recipe for your disaster?

Ingredient #2--I believe air will first try to go around a hill and next go over in that order. I could be wrong. Understanding that water and air behave differently and just for the sake of visualization,-- one could stand on a bridge and watch what happens when a round bolder, just under the surface, does to the flow of the water. There will be a depression just in back of the bolder and then a rooster tail mound of water down current of the depression.

If we could see the air I believe it would look just like that downwind of a hill/overpass.

Just up wind from our Little Florida Mt. site and to the left is Dragon Ridge. Launch faces west. When the wind is from the southwest the convergence down wind of Dragon Ridge will move around and sometimes give you lift or sink depending on which way the dragon is wagging his tail. I call it riding the dragons tail when soaring the Little Florida Mt. in a SW wind.
I’m sure that having a obstacle up wind would be a basic ingredient in this recipe.
Not knowing this site but from it’s description, so far, of descending terrain as it goes west, I would tend to give more weight to the ribbon that was showing westerly.
I would really, really be hoping that I made the right call.
If your GPS crumb trail shows that you followed that call I would guess that 8 out of 10 times you would have got it right.
As Buck McMinn told me---“If we could see the air we fly in, ----we wouldn’t!”
Bill C.

Bill,

Thanks for your additional post. There are enough possibilities involved in my accident that it makes analysis difficult or impossible. If I remembered everything during the last minute or two of my flight, I think things would be MUCH clearer. It feels odd talking about my own accident as if it happened to some poor guy who bit the dust and can't tell anyone what mistakes he made.

But there is one thing that occurred to me while walking my dog this afternoon. It happens to be a favorite walking location that also includes the landing mishap "zone". Well, in looking at my GPS track log for the flight, I looked closely at final glide altitudes and glider direction and of course, precise location via Google Earth. But what I realized is that I did not look at my ground speed (which is all a GPS can really give), while in the air during my final approach. Depending on what I find when I scrutinize this information, things could become much clearer as to what happened.

Examples -

If I was experiencing a tail wind, my ground speed should well exceed 30 mph - by as much as 10 to 15 mph. This is most likely as I have developed the habit of speeding into ground effect with my Fusion. This strategy helps avoid stalls as I move through (and into) wind gradient as I approach the ground. There's no reason I can think of that I wouldn't be following the same pattern of behavior on this day.

My ground speed(s) in the last stall(?) portion of my flight (which involved a 180 degree turn) could reveal whether it was (low) air speed or turbulence induced. If my ground speed was close to or below minimum stall speed for my glider, then it could very well be that my air speed was also too slow.

If my ground speed is initially above or close to stall speed then my air speed could have been alright - I just hit some kind of mechanical turbulence. This would fit even better if my ground speed increased significantly as I moved through the 180 degree direction change. This would indicate that I was flying faster than the wind speed rather than being fully stalled and simply falling downward through the air.

If, during the straight portion of my final approach, my forward ground speed fits closely with an air speed of 30 - 35 mph then the wind could have been blowing 90 degrees across my path - not speeding me up, or slowing me (my ground speed) down.

I have uploaded a .jpg screen capture of my flight's track log from Google Earth. The site won't allow actual track log file extensions to be uploaded.

[Note: I have my GPS set to take a reading at 2 second intervals. I would suggest others also set their GPS units to a similar high frequency sample rate. This allows for close examination of flight details. That can help when things go wrong. Imagine if I had set my GPS to record at 1 minute or greater intervals? I'd have much fewer clues as to what happened.]

I have just scrutinized my (ground) speed readings from my GPS track log. What I see (take a look at the picture in my last post above) is that my speed was good up to and including the turn over the river.

However, just after my turn, in the brief straight line course I held, my ground speed increased to 53 mph, and next reading, 47 mph.

If the wind was northerly (picture is oriented with north toward the top) then my speed should not have increased to such a high velocity. If I'd decided to do a radical turn (which I sometimes do with sufficient altitude) it would make sense that I accelerated to such speeds. Thing is, . . . I was at only aprox. 120 feet at this point. I would not have initiated such a radical turn at this low altitude.

It is revealing to me that my speed increased dramatically with this turn. This indicates to me that there is actually a quite good chance that there was a tailing (W by WSW) wind and that that accounts for my speed gain just after that turn. Seems that I (was) turned down wind!

Finally, as my glide went from soaring to slowly descending, I clearly recall the wind flags that I have up on the strip between the river and highway showing a westerly breeze. Therefore, it makes NO SENSE that, at 120 feet of altitude I would make a snappy turn down wind. I will hazard a guess that that low turn was externally induced, not purposefully initiated. I was whacked in mid air by something nasty! This also fits in explaining my final 180 degree stalling turn near the ground. I ended up with no altitude to play with, but attempted to bring the wing back around into the evident westerly wind. That was a better choice than pounding in down wind at 20 - 30 mph!

wingspan33 wrote:I have uploaded a .jpg screen capture of my flight's track log from Google Earth.

It's really amazing to be able to review your flight in that level of detail!! But I'm a little bit ignorant of their color coding. It looks like the color represents altitude. Is that true? Also, is there a way to have the color represent groundspeed?

wingspan33 wrote:The site won't allow actual track log file extensions to be uploaded.

Please let me know what I can do to support those kinds of files. That's what will make this site better!!

Bob,

Yes, the coloring is by altitude, but when converting the file from.gdb to .kml (Google Earth file) I can set the color to show speed. Unfortunately, my old lap top here is too old or slow to handle Google Earth (GE) properly. I've got to transfer the file to another computer in the house and plug it into GE. I'll get a screen capture image from there. Probably have it up tomorrow.

About allowing file extensions, . . . Can you just add a .xxx file extension and be able to down load it? The file extensions for Garmins GPS' are ".gdb". Google Earth is ".klm" . If it's preset and you can't change settings then we may be out of luck.

Below you will see the details of my track log - every reading taken from just before the turn over the river - till I meet the ground. It's only 26 seconds of my flight - but it is the most dramatic part.

732 6/13/2012 4:53:35 PM 1311 ft 86 ft 0:00:02 29 mph 272° true N42 19.477 W77 18.492
733 6/13/2012 4:53:37 PM 1294 ft 93 ft 0:00:02 32 mph 263° true N42 19.477 W77 18.511
734 6/13/2012 4:53:39 PM 1279 ft 92 ft 0:00:02 31 mph 260° true N42 19.475 W77 18.532
735 6/13/2012 4:53:41 PM 1268 ft 88 ft 0:00:02 30 mph 273° true N42 19.473 W77 18.552
736 6/13/2012 4:53:43 PM 1260 ft 82 ft 0:00:02 28 mph 338° true N42 19.473 W77 18.571
737 6/13/2012 4:53:45 PM 1224 ft 152 ft0:00:02 52 mph 64° true N42 19.486 W77 18.578
738 6/13/2012 4:53:47 PM 1175 ft 138 ft0:00:02 47 mph 62° true N42 19.497 W77 18.548
739 6/13/2012 4:53:49 PM 1182 ft 89 ft 0:00:02 30 mph 347° true N42 19.507 W77 18.521
740 6/13/2012 4:53:51 PM 1139 ft 32 ft 0:00:02 11 mph 291° true N42 19.522 W77 18.525
741 6/13/2012 4:53:53 PM 1126 ft 12 ft 0:00:02 4 mph 239° true N42 19.523 W77 18.532
742 6/13/2012 4:53:55 PM 1128 ft 5 ft 0:00:02 2 mph 228° true N42 19.522 W77 18.534
743 6/13/2012 4:53:57 PM 1128 ft 4 ft 0:00:02 1.3 mph 226° true N42 19.522 W77 18.535
744 6/13/2012 4:53:59 PM 1128 ft 4 ft 0:00:02 1.3 mph 169° true N42 19.521 W77 18.536
745 6/13/2012 4:54:01 PM 1128 ft 7 ft 0:00:02 2 mph 138° true N42 19.521 W77 18.535

wingspan33 wrote:About allowing file extensions, . . . Can you just add a .xxx file extension and be able to down load it? The file extensions for Garmins GPS' are ".gdb". Google Earth is ".klm" . If it's preset and you can't change settings then we may be out of luck.

Thanks for helping me with this!!

Here's what I have available to me in the "Manage Extension Groups" control panel:


Then there's another control panel that lets me assign specific extensions (like .gdb or .klm) to those "Extension Groups" (categories). So if you see a category in that list that makes sense, I can add those specific extensions to those categories (maybe "Documents" or "Downloadable Files"?). Alternately, I could add a new more generic category for something like "Track Files" or even more generic like "Hawks Allowed Files". Either of those approaches might work right now.

I haven't found a way to enable all attachment extensions (.xxx), but I probably wouldn't want to do that anyway since they warn about specific kinds of files being security risks for the site. So maybe I can try just the ".gdb" and ".klm" in an appropriate Extension Group to get us started. How does that sound?

Thanks, by the way, for helping improve the site. It's good to have you back!!