On Jul 12, 9:21*am, wrote:
Le mercredi 11 juillet 2012 22:58:22 UTC+2, Bob Kuykendall a écrit*:
.....

: As the tow plane and glider accelerated down the runway several
: witnesses noticed that the tail dolly remained attached to the
glider.
: The witnesses immediately advised the glider operations dispatcher,
: who in turn made the radio call “abort, abort, abort”.
.....
Feel free to disagree, but I think that a better approach might have
been to tell the pilot exactly what is known:
Thanks, Bob K.

We had a similar tail dolly incident some years ago at my club: take-off with the (modified, heavy) tail dolly on a Twin Astir. It turned into an accident when an instructor on the ground noticed this during take-off and radioed to abort. Unfortunately, the pilot did release when already flying and almost at the end of the runway. The sailplane went straight into the opposite bank of the large ditch surrounding the airfield. Result: one pilot seriously wounded, one passenger lightly wounded, the Twin total loss.

Some years before - we had no radio then -, I did fly that sailplane myself with the same tail dolly on (shame on me!), and I never noticed anything out of the ordinary. So I agree: by all means inform the pilot about what is happening, but wait until he has enough altitude to fly the airplane and check the controllability first. A few meters above the ground, you have no options left...

Agreed, a tail dolly doesn't require a panicky radio call.

A few years ago while working at a commercial glider operation, we got
a phone call from someone who had seen our Genesis II happily flying
with the tail dolly on it. The caller didn't want to make a radio
call himself and thoughtfully dropped the problem in our lap. Our
thought process from that point is possibly interesting.

The first thought was the glider is obviously controllable since it
has been in flight for 30 minutes or so with the pilot apparently
unaware of the dolly. We had been suggesting to the pilot he should
add weights to the rear post to move the CG aft for better handling
and climb anyway - the dolly had probably moved the CG just that
amount. We decided there was no urgency.

The second question is should we make the radio call. If we did, what
would we tell him? We discussed the landing and decided the correct
action would be to make a normal landing since the G2 is a nose wheel
glider and the dolly is very unlikely to touch the runway.

We decided the greatest risk was the dolly would fall off the glider
and land on someone. Since the dolly fit securely, we didn't think
this was much of a risk.

We put out word that no one should radio the pilot and just allow him
to make a normal landing. An uneventful landing happened after a
couple of hours. Now it was time to have a little fun at the pilots
expense.

I walked up to the glider with the pilot still in it and still unaware
of the dolly. "How was your flight", I asked. "Great", he said, "It
seemed to handle much better." "Well", I said, "we've been telling
you it would fly better if you moved the CG aft but we'd really prefer
you did it with the internal weights". He looked puzzled, then,
slowly, as he climbed out and saw the dolly, his expression changed to
astonishment and horror. He bought us dinner.