On Aug 27, 8:38*pm, 2G wrote:
On Saturday, August 25, 2012 9:11:45 PM UTC-7, Jp Stewart wrote:
From TA's Dansville contest write-up:

"Unfortunately, we were also saddened to hear of yet another apparent stall-spin fatality; Jim Rizzo, Finger Lakes club president and FAA Designated Examiner for the area was killed when his glider crashed into a farmer’s field not far from the Dansville airport. *Jim was not part of the contest and was just flying locally when the accident occurred. *All we know is what the farmer said (and this is 3rd hand to me) that apparently Jim was trying to thermal away from a low altitude and spun in (sound familiar? – it should – this is the 3rd almost identical fatality this season here on the east coast)."

http://soaringcafe.com/2012/08/day-6...ille-region-3/

JP

This accident is just ANOTHER in a long string of accidents where the pilot felt, incorrectly, that their pilotage abilities were adequate for the task at hand. I agree with UH, there is NOTHING to be learned from this accident, because if you chose to push the envelope you are going to, SOONER OR LATER, find yourself over its edge. So YOU THINK you are a better pilot than Jim? Maybe you are, maybe you aren't: are you WILLING TO KILL YOURSELF to find out?

The solution IS NOT to fly faster when you are lower; the solution is to NOT GET YOURSELF into the situation to begin with!

Everybody likes to get back and tell their story about a low save; everybody OOHs and AWHs. Nobody says "You DUMB ****, YOU COULD HAVE KILLED YOURSELF!"

What I do is simple risk management: what are the tradeoffs of pulling such a stunt off versus the downside. Generally speaking, when the downside is killing yourself, there is no upside that will justify itself. If you land out, it might take you a day to get retrieved (just did one of those: it was ****ty, but the pilot lived). In this case, the retrieve would have been 2-3 hours, as compared to BEING DEAD!

We have got to stop the culture of adulating pilots who do dumb things. Now, they will still do dumb things, but we have to pointedly tell them that it is DUMB!

End of rant.

Tom
2G

Tell us Tom, how did you crack up your DG-400 years ago?

Brad