Guess I'm just unlucky as I've had this twice.
Many years ago in a Kestrel 19 the brake drive in one
wing failed. Didn't even notice till I'd landed and
saw one brake out and one in.
Second time was test flying a club Grob Acro after
C of A and rigging. It had some cosmetic work done
on the brake slots. On the ground everything worked
perfectly, it had a rigging check, DI, and 2 pre flights
because we initially had a ground run cable break.
On approach the brakes would not open, but did so after
applying quite alot of pressure. In fact one opened
and the other side wing pushrod bent.
After repairs we tried again, after first getting a
lot of people pushing up on the wings, the brakes were
OK. Top of the launch, they would not open until we
pushed over for some reduced G.
It turned out that the cosmetic repairs had closed
up the end gap which the caps need to move about 3
mm tipwise before opening, and the caps were jamming.
It needed a lot of removal before they worked properly.
The point is that there were no control problems whatsoever
with one brake in and one out.

Dave Salmon





At 04:12 22 September 2005, wrote:
I committed one of the worst errors - an incomplete
preflight check.
I did not check the hotelier locks to the spoiler rods
with enough care
before takeoff. Coming into the pattern I extended
the spoilers and
noticed immediately that something was wrong. The glider
(SparrowHawk)
was pulling to one side and the rate of descent was
not as much as I
expected. However the glider was easily controllable.
A few seconds and
I saw that the right spoiler was not deploying. What
to do? A couple of
attempts to close and open the spoilers did not actuate
the right
spoiler. Then, oh well, lets check and see the effect
of landing with
only one spoiler. The situation was less dramatic than
expected.
Maximum sink rate was halved and the SparrowHawk needed
some cross
control to fly straight but no problem. The landing
was easy and
controllable. The lessons to be learnt from this are
2 fold: 1) landing
a glider with only one spoiler should be easy for most
pilots and 2) do
a serious preflight inspection especially after assembly.
Dave