On Tuesday, October 2, 2018 at 4:04:09 AM UTC-7, Dan Daly wrote:
Retitled from "yesterday" to make future searches easier.

Unfortunately, medical issues in the cockpit can jam the controls. This happened to a friend of mine when a walk up passenger had a epileptic seizure on tow. The passenger pulled hard back on the stick in a Blanik. It resulted in vertical climb, broke the rope and then impacted the ground killing the passenger in the front seat and severely injuring my friend in the back seat. This happened at El Tiro in the late 80's while I was there. A medical issue can explain several things. Times of control and times of chaos, not bailing out because he is your friend and you are trying to save his life. The high G maneuver at the end certainly caused them to blackout. Remember, the whole thing started at 14,500 when they started heading east away from the direction the contest start line over Truckee. All this we have good records of their flight trace via the PFlarm data from takeoff to heading east over Rose after thermalling with another glider. Then things got crazy as they lost over 4000 ft in 2 minutes and a I witnesses saw them at around 10k doing these crazy maneuvers out of control. This timeline is important to understanding what happened. IF any of this is true, then this brings up the subject of anyone flying with a safety pilot with a known problem. Flying in a two place plane has never been more complicated in my mind. I have and have not flown with people with known medical problems by my choice. Going forward it will never happen again nor will I ever consider asking someone to be that safety pilot.

We might never know what really happened, but all the time and effort to try and understand is a healthy exercise for our community. Imagine if nothing was being said, that would add to this already tragic event.