On Tuesday, June 24, 2014 8:29:11 PM UTC-4, son_of_flubber wrote:
On Tuesday, June 24, 2014 10:48:14 AM UTC-4, Evan Ludeman wrote:

If you were to try this (ed. landing inverted), the glider would touch down on the tail with the nose pitched rather high and the fuselage would drop hard on the cockpit, still with significant forward speed.



Then maybe the fuselage would break behind the wings, thus dissipating a great deal of energy and the pieces would come to rest relatively intact like in the photo of the Long Mynd landing. I conclude that 'flying the glider' until it stops is the better option even if the glider is inverted.



When someone crawls out of a wreck that stops inverted, it's because the glider flopped on its back at the end of some sort of tumble and it happened to do so in a relatively gentle fashion....



Tumbling a glider in 'a relatively gentle fashion' is a possibility??

No, of course not. It's violent as hell. However it does sometimes happen that *after* most of the energy is dissipated the glider goes over the nose in a less violent fashion and *that* is sometimes survivable.

T8