On Jul 20, 5:24*pm, John Smith wrote:
bildan wrote:
On Jul 20, 2:55 pm, John *wrote:
bildan wrote:
My experience is the difference between the worst and
best handling glider is fairly small.

No. Give a low-time student an ASK-21 and he will happily thermal away..
Give the same student a Fox and he will kill himself.

... Let me repeat my key point - you can't buy safety, you have to earn it

...

Without any doubt. But you claimed that the difference in handling among
gliders was "fairly small". And this just isn't so.


It is so.

If you step outside the cloistered world of sailplanes into the world
of airplanes you'll find very wide differences. Withing the wide
world of aviation, sailplanes exist in a "fairly small" envelope of
handling qualities. There are outliers, of course, but the majority
are pretty much alike in being very benign, gentle aircraft. Pilots
whose entire experience is limited to sailplanes may tend to magnify
small differences others wouldn't notice.

I've never flown a glider with a 'bad rep' which lived up to it and I
have more than 200 types in my logbook. I once owned a Lark IS28B2
which, in come circles, has a bad reputation for unintentional spins.
You'll hear things like, "It'll just drop out from under you." This
isn't true.

I took one such pilot for a BFR check ride in the Lark. When I asked
him to demonstrate slow flight, he didn't notice the glider's
pronounced pre-stall buffet. It was shaking the glider until stuff
fell off the Velcro but HE was shaking even more than the glider.
When I took the controls, calmed him down and asked him to feel the
buffet, I was able to tell him, "See, it warns you before it stalls -
just feel for the buffet." For him it was an epiphany - he really
enjoyed the rest of the flight.

Same thing with a 2-32 which is a big old sweetheart. It has a nice
little shake to the stick which tells you it's too slow but you won't
feel it if you have a death grip. Yes, it'll spin but not without
warning.