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Old May 16th 20, 01:39 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Jonathan St. Cloud
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Default Glider release failure?

On Thursday, May 14, 2020 at 12:35:18 PM UTC-7, Duster wrote:
Has anyone heard of or experienced a case where the pull of the glider's release handle during flight failed to result in the rope dropping off the release mechanism? Last summer two of us were under tow when turbulence threw us too high above the tug (or sink drove the tug too low) @~2,000ft agl. One of us remarked that "We need to release", and we each pulled the handles. I pulled mine again at least twice and I distinctly remember the cable moving a few cm each time. We turned away from the tug, but after a few seconds I thought I heard a loud bang accompanied by a slight, transient vibration, but no nose movement. Pulled the handle several more times. First I'm thinking we hit the towplane, but then I saw him below and ahead of us with about 4-6' of rope trailing off his Tost release, then radioed him to report the rope break. An inspection did not reveal any evidence that the rope had gotten hung up on the gear doors, wing or empennage. Testing the release gave the normal rope drop after a few mm's of pull, even under heavy tension. The other pilot didn't hear the "break", but the flight logger did record it as a spike of noise on the trace. Any hypotheses on this one?

Perhaps in a related incident, the 2017 Pawnee fatality accident report where there was intra-cockpit video, the glider pilot reported that (after an admitted distraction) he got high on tow, noticed some rope slack, pulled the dive brakes and released the rope. The GoPro showed almost full deployment of the spoilers, first a short movement of the release cable, followed by a "snapping sound", followed by a longer slack in the cable. The report also revealed a short length of rope hanging from the Pawnee (with a high tension break). The NTSB could only conclude that the tug pilot had, for some unknown reason, lost control. Other factors were suggested. The similarity between that incident and ours was that each glider pilot pulled the release handle, assumed the rope fell away but ended up with a rope break. That's my reading of the report, but I may have missed something.


Distracted on tow! How does that happen? Isn't flying the most important thing you have to do for the first four minutes of flight? Have glider pilots not heard oof a sterile cockpit?