On Sunday, May 5, 2013 9:59:33 AM UTC-4, son_of_flubber wrote:
All of the land out stories that I've heard are about landing out on small family farms and the advice is always along the lines of, be friendly, let the farmer's kids sit in the glider etc...



Any stories about landing out in places other than on a small farm? Dealing with corporate security, corporate legal departments, bills for grossly inflated damages, pesticides, etc..



My favorite landout story involves a wetland, and quick while the EPA is not looking, a Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer. It is not my story, so I will not try to retell it, but maybe you get the picture of what I am looking for.

Following is from a member of my club. I deleted a couple of names to protect ... well... just because. Some of you will immediately know who this is. Even if you don't, it's a good story:

Yo: 1987 Sports Class Nationals at Elmira, typical Elmira weather, HHH. The nice folks in Elmira feel soaring is a family affair and hold their contests when the little *******s are out of school, July-August. The contest was all but washed out, they were sending us up in barely VFR conditions. I forget what the task was but I found myself never over 2,000 agl as I went from field to field, over Watkins-Glen, up the east side of Seneca Lake the whole time at pattern altitude. One of the turnpoints was Seneca Depot; I later found out it was the largest A-bomb storage facility in the country. I would have thought such a place would be in Utah or Nevada. The sectional showed a long runway and a unicom frequency, nothing special, not a restricted area or anything like that. What really made my mind up was the unicom, surely a secret place wouldn't have a unicom frequency. I arrived over the place at 1,000 and looked it over. It had a vast street pattern and looked like any town USA; only at the head of each driveway, where one would expect to see a house and garage, was a mound of dirt. Lots and lots of mounds of dirt.

I called them on unicom and said I was landing. They said: "you can't land here." I thought: screw them, I'm I glider and we'll talk about it on the ground. The two E-7s were really nice guys and asked how I came to land there. I told them I was a Polish U-2 pilot and wanted political asylum. They said that although they thought that was funny they had to push the alarm button and a bunch of kids with guns were coming and it would not be in my best interest to say anything like that to them. The kids showed up in a truck, they had lots of guns including a heavy barrel .50 cal. on a ring mount and operated by a kid who was mostly pimples.

Seneca New York was the birthplace of the women's lib movement, the sufferage movement started there. Seneca Depot was plagued by the Mothers for Peace and the kids with guns thought I was affiliated with the "mothers." The dears had bought a farm across from the main gate and would protest the A-bombs on a regular basis. When not protesting they would burn their bras, write poetry, grow organic food and generally do the **** liberated ladies delight in doing. I had pretty much convinced the kids with guns that I wasn't, in any way, associated with the Mothers when the two state cops showed up.. The cops announced that I was their perpetrator and they would take me into custody. The sergeant in charge of the kids with guns said I was his perpetrator and they couldn't have me. An argument ensued. The argument was stopped by the sound of the rollers on the ring mount .50. It had been pointed at me and looked like the mouth of a railroad tunnel, it now pointed at the cops. The cops quickly left.

[My new wife] had recruited [two SSA members] to help with the retrieve. [Member 1] was head of the Langley Research facility and his G rating outranked the Colonel that commanded the depot and thank Christ for that or we'd be there yet. My retrieve crew had been told that there was going to be a "mission" on in an hour and if we weren't out of there by then we'd be put in a windowless room until the mission was over. [My new wife] told me to sit in the car and keep my f***ing mouth shut (and yeah, she was gonna be a nun). You would pay cash money to see three Germans take a German glider apart - took something like ten minutes.