On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 7:46:50 PM UTC-5, son_of_flubber wrote:
I wonder if the old hands in XC have forgotten how big the issue of safely landing out looms in the mind of the aspiring XC pilot?

Whoa, wait a minute - what does XC have to do with landing out? Last time I checked, there is NO guarantee that a local flight in a glider will end up on an airfield! And if you look at NTSB accident reports (thank you Tom Knauff!), a surprising number of "local" instructional and solo flight end up "aux vaches"! What you are saying is that our (USA) training system does not put enough emphasis on a basic skill in flying gliders - the technique for picking a suitable landout field and accomplishing a safe pattern, landing, and recovery of the glider to the home field. THIS SHOULD BE DONE BEFORE GETTING YOUR LICENSE! It is not some fancy skill reserved to those lucky glassholes who disappear for hours on end (but sometimes need to be retrieved from some lonely field, having to buy dinner for the ravenous retrieve crew).

My perspective is that efforts to foster XC should focus on thoroughly preparing novices to land out (in fields and at unfamiliar airports). XC novices are not babies. We will take the initiative to learn all the other fine points of XC and to initiate all the necessary changes in club guidelines and structure. Your coaching is invaluable, and we will ask for it once we get the XC bug.

If your instructor didn't begin preparing you for the inevitable landout prior to solo, and continue until your checkride, then he has done you a great disservice (but is probably typical of most US instructors who themselves have never landed out) and reflects the FAA's complacency in our poor training requirements. If the Silver badge was a requirement for a glider PPL (like in Germany) that would probably change - but I don't see that ever happening in the US!


Everything about XC beyond land outs seems very doable to me. I'm an XC pre-novice until I'm prepared to safely land out. Get me over that hurdle and I can manage the rest.

Get yourself over "that hurdle". Read everything about landouts you can find (many club sites have information), talk to pilots who have done them, practice accurate patterns until you KNOW you can land your glider over an obstacle into a short field, walk the fields around your gliderfield and imagine landing in them, pick out fields you would land in while driving your car or even on local flights. If you can get some dual time in a motorglider or lightplane to scout out landable fields and check out your decision process, all the better.

And from what I gather in my area, the restrictions on using my club's aircraft for XC followed from bad experiences with landouts in the past. QED

See above. A serious glider pilot has to do the homework himself. Then go out and fly! If you have a plan and follow it (which includes always having a suitable field picked out EARLY enough to really check it out) then the actual landout is actually kinda fun...I'ts cool to get out of your glider in some quiet little field and realize you are probably the first person to ever land a plane there - and then get to explain to the locals how "the wind quit"!

OTOH - A rushed landout is ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING! BTDT. Have a plan, and when the time comes, execute it.

Kirk
66
(My last landout was on 2 July, in a nice cut wheat field in southern Illinois - it's on OLC if you want to see how it evolved - US flight #82 for that day, in Google maps you can see the field I landed in and the pattern I flew to get into it.)