So there I was… just a foot or so off the ground with a full regiment of hay bales charging at me.
I was landing in a field just south of Big Pine - a farm field. The north side of the field had been recently cut and cleared. The south side was populated by hay bales. The wind was from the south. There was a road and high-tension power lines along the north side. The plan was to come in over the power lines and land in the first half of the field, short of the hay bales… without using the drag chute.
The thing about the drag chute on the Kestrel is that there two separate actuation cables with similar “T” handles but very different functions. One, labeled “Deploy”, presents the chute to the airstream whereupon it opens up and immediately generates enormous drag. The other, labeled “Jettison”, disconnects the chute at the point where the shrouds attach to the sailplane’s tail, whereupon there is no more drag.
The thinking behind this design was, no doubt, that you might misjudge your pattern with the chute such that you are not able to make it over a fence or trees at the approach end of the field. Rather than punish you for this misdeed, the plane allows you to jettison the whole thing, land without it (if you have enough room to do so) and walk back later to pick it up.
Of course, once you jettison it, there is no way to deploy it again during that flight. In fact, and this is the tricky bit, if you select jettison first and then subsequently deploy it, you will get both a deployment and jettison simultaneously, with no significant effect on drag.
All this means is that it’s important to select the correct control for any given occasion.
The other thing to realize about the drag chute on the Kestrel is that it is stunningly effective. You have to push the nose down when it opens to keep the plane flying. My brother, and partner in this particular aircraft, had warned me about this. He had also warned that the chute might not always open. It might get stuck. Or it might have already been inadvertently jettisoned (there was no way of knowing until the chute was deployed).
His advice was, if you elect to use the chute, do so on downwind so you can adjust your pattern for a steep descend if it opens, or not if it doesn’t.
I had practiced with the chute at the home field until I was comfortable with it use, but on this occasion, I decided it wasn’t needed. Alas, that is, until well into the flair. It seems that after the steep descent over the power lines I was carrying a bit more speed than expected. And though the hay bales had, from the air, looked to be widely scattered, from down here they seemed to have formed up into an impenetrable rank, at least for a 19-meter wing.
At that point I elected to deploy the chute to slow things down a bit - avoid engagement. As mentioned previously, this requires that I pull the correct handle, which means looking down in the cockpit to make my selection.
The self-preservation instincts of humans would be a fine subject for a grand dissertation. For our purposes, let it suffice to say that if you put your head down for any significant length of time while zooming over the ground at low level, you will instinctively pull back on the stick, at least a little.
Apparently, I ballooned up a bit before locating the correct handle. The chute opened immediately as evidenced by a sudden jerk. By the time I got my head back up looking out the canopy the plane had come to a complete stop about 8 feet in the air. I felt like one of those cartoon characters that walks off a cliff and has a moment to realize it before they start to fall. I had enough just enough time to say “Uh oh”; then WHAM!
Fortunately, the only damage was a broken axle. It had been cut down to about half its diameter just inside the fork as a weak link. The wheel was jammed up into the well sideways but still sticking out enough to protect the doors.
Hannes Linke turned a new axle for me and I was back in the air and off on new adventure by the next weekend.