On Jul 23, 11:58*pm, Mike the Strike wrote:

"Based on my experience of flying out west, 2 out of 60 is pretty much
par for a contest."


Mike, I'm sure you will agree with me that 2 accidents is 2 too many.

All, what are we doing in this sport to prevent this from happening
again? It really makes me sick to my stomach to see contestants
demolish their gliders only to have it hushed up by contest
management. Seeing people get hurt or killed in contests lowers the
participation rate. We need to hear about the accidents in order to
learn a lesson!! I personally know two pilots who quit flying in
contests when they watched a glider cartwheel end over end landing in
an unlandable field. Yet, the contest report for that day said
nothing regarding the accident and just showed a W, F for Withdrew
from contest and Flight log.


If someone says a task was called over 80 miles of unlandable terrain,
yet another pilot claims there's always a suitable field within 8
miles of the course line, then why aren't these suitable fields being
entered into the turnpoint database? Situational awareness would
greatly improve if you got low and could see the distance, direction
and altituded needed to find this suitable field.

Looking at the turnpoint database for Logan, it shows lots of mountain
peaks for turnpoints. Nobody needs glide navigation into mountain
peaks. Pilots need glide navigation into suitable fields. How about
using actual suitable landing areas for turnpoints? We're not taking
pictures of easily identifiable turnpoints with Kodak cameras
anymore!! Maybe our accident ratio of 2 out of 60, would be much much
lower if people had these suitable fields marked on their GPS.

I love this sport and hate to hear of accidents happening.