At 20:42 04 December 2005, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Derek Copeland wrote:

While a headrest may be an important
safety item in a car to protect you from whiplash
in
a rear end shunt, I am still trying to work out in
what circumstances a glider might get rammed from
behind?!!!!!!
Stupid F***ing Bureaucrats!

Perhaps the 'Stupid F***ing Bureaucrat' saw the same
video I saw at an
SSA convention: it showed the pilot dummy movement
during a test crash
of a glider, with violent whiplash occurring. I then
asked Gerhard
Waibel about the safety value of the headrest in Schleicher
gliders, and
he told me it was very important. So, I retrieved the
headrest for my
ASH 26 E from the basement and put it back in the glider!

So what do you have to do to achieve the whiplash -
Tailslide backwards into the ground?

I did once injure my neck as a result of a student's
very heavy landing. Basically my head went forwards
and down and I got what is called an 'acute flexion
injury' which is the reverse of the usual whiplash
injury where the head initially goes backwards. I don't
believe that a headrest would have helped. I had to
wear a surgical collar for several weeks after this,
but luckily no permanent damage was done.

On the subject of making K21s spin, there is a privately
owned K21 at Lasham that spins and recovers very nicely
(unlike our club owned one), even with a slightly heavy
pilot like myself on board. This was rebuilt after
a crash several years ago, before which it had been
a perfectly normal K21 with the usual reluctance to
spin. I don't know whether the tail got heavier or
the angle of incidence of the tailplane was changed
during the repairs, to account for this change in spinning
characteristics. Perhaps Schleichers should take a
look at this particular glider and incorporate any
changes from the standard specification into their
production models?

Derek Copeland