Just to stay clear, mainly because of disinformation, the glider GN, was taken out of the competition as there was a handling issue. The glider was being tail tow to runway 25 by a car, when the hook got disconnected from the car. As you can imagine a glider with water has a lot of inertial energy, so it started running against the car, as the glider did a turn, one of the wings hit the car, damaging severely one of it flaps. The pilot understood there was no way to fly a glider under that condition, so he pull out of the competition.

A few things that need to be considered for the near future. I have been working from the initial stages, in the OGN project in Chile, from installing them in hills you could ever think that someone could climb (or land on a helicopter) to calibrating and helping to develop the software.

In both cases, Klaus and Tomas, reaction was within the “gold minutes” for a pilot’s survival stage, location was precise and rescue procedures where in the correct lane in both cases. Technology has been upgrading at an amazing speed, flight replay can be done with an extreme precision nowadays that you are able to detect almost every dangerous situation that happens, but it’s a past tense.

The problem is that this is not a proactive solution, as it has to be analyzed later, and “later” could lead to a fatality, in which case it only allows you to find reasons but not to bring your pilot safety back home.
One of the improvements we talked around the club, is regarding SPOT. A device that could be programmed (hardware and software) with a few variables that would help to automatically notify a crash. We think it is not a hard step for SPOT, to include an accelerometer within the device, that constantly compares deceleration (in vertical and horizontal axis) together with ground speed. Under certain precise conditions within this two variables, a crash can be detected immediately, therefor launching the alarm without the need for the pilot to press a button in case of loss of consciousness, where obviously the pilot is in no condition to launch the alarm.

In conclusion, technology has lead us to great improvements around the OGN Project, but we are in the certain need to forward this “past” information, to the “future”, in order to detect when a certain behavior is noticed on a pilot. Accidents are the product of a sum of bad decisions, and the only way to avoid an incident is to break the chain of errors...

FBP