Shawn wrote in message ...
Ben Flewett wrote:
At 15:54 02 November 2004, Stefan wrote:

There is no such thing as 'trapped' by a layer if you
act
as you should.



Sounds like you haven't done much cross country wave
flying.

If you do enough cross country wave flying you will,
sooner of later, get trapped above cloud. Sometimes
you are forced to fly part of your task above 8/8 where
we fly. Other times the cloud can close quickly and
you get caught.

We were trained to position approx 1km downwind of
a known landing point using GPS (depending on terrain),
set the glider up in a stable position and open the
airbrakes at 70kts. Not desirable by any stretch of
the imagination but sometimes a required technique.



Why downwind?

Am I missing something here? If I were caught above a cloud layer, I
would go to into a spin before trying a "benign spiral". A spin is a
controlled maneuver where a spiral seems more likely to get out of
control.