On Nov 2, 7:15 am, Waduino wrote:

...Am I being silly in putting automatic connection
so high on my list?...

I certainly don't think so.

My friend Steve Smith has calculated that, overall, there is an
uncorrected connection fault in about 1 of every 1000 times a
sailplane is assembled, and that about 50% of those connection faults
result in a fatal accident. The other 50% aren't that pretty either.

Given those numbers, in a contest season of 2000 assemblies you'd see
about one fatality every year. My memory is far from perfect, but It
seems that that's what we saw through the 1990s.

As another poster wrote, the numbers get a helluva lot better once you
have auto connects for at least the primary flight controls. I don't
know of any accidents or even incidents where the standard arm-in-
funnel or pin-in-slot torsional auto-connects failed to engage.

Thanks, Bob K.