"Flying" your glider on the ground after a landout during athunderstorm or alternatives?

On 6/3/2019 7:58 AM, Charles Ethridge wrote:

Snip...

In powered planes, one can use the engine to stay in place, but with a
glider, assuming that you do not have a hammer and a "claw" ground tie-down
to tie down the nose of the glider, wouldn't the strong wind move you
backwards, perhaps breaking the tail assembly?

And if you get lifted off by a gust, couldn't that technique prove deadly?

But then if that technique is inherently dangerous, what is a less
dangerous technique? Quartering the glider into the wind and sitting on
the upwind wing? I don't remember reading that one either in any of my
glidering books. For that matter, I don't remember reading about ANY
approaching thunderstorm landout techniques in any of my glidering books.

What have you done in this situation that has worked out well...and not?
Lotta good questions, lotta sortsa winds/sailplanes, & lotta useful techniques...

I distinguish between strong *shifty* (in a directional sense) winds, and
'merely' strong, directionally-steady, winds. In the absence of being tied
down, the latter are less problematic in my experience.

The short-form answer is: "What's best to do depends on the (ship) details."
(The devil is ALWAYS in the details!) F'r'example, 15-meter tail-dragging
glass is quite different from (say) a 1-26, or a 2-33, or a nose-dragging G-103.

In the inter-mountain west, shifty/gusty ground winds are common...as are
wingtips banging against the ground of unaccompanied, untied-down ships, at
every gliderport from which I've flown. In every case I've watched or known
the details of, the wingtip banging has been of ships whose upwind wing was
"held down" by a parachute or old tire. The early advice given to me was to
*always* weight the upwind wing. Well, when the upwind wing belongs to a 2-33
that decides to change wingtips, it's an attention-getting,
seriously-alarming, proposition! Less so for ships with higher wingloadings
and lower spars...but stil (IMO) ugly to watch/listen-to.

Having hopped into another club's 'tire-held-down' 2-33 and ground-flown-it
(for ~20 minutes) just before a gust front arrived, it proved no big
deal...though 'genuinely interesting' as the nose rotated against the skid
through an arc exceeding 30-degrees. Without someone in it, it would've almost
surely been transformed into the proverbial 'ball,' but I never felt there was
any risk of it ever being lifted into the air with me inside; I didn't use
spoilers continuously...tired arm muscles.

Eventually I came to believe it was better - for 15 meter glass, anyway - to
place the DOWNwind wingtip on the ground those times I opted to walk away from
my unattended ship, because - in a wingtip-rocking sense - the ship was more
stable. For the record I've never seen a ship in that configuration alter its
'baseline resting configuration.'

In any event, I put my thinking to the acid test for several hours after a
landout in straightline winds from a steady direction, varying from (maybe) 10
knots to (estimated) 35+ knots...strong enough to cause dust blizzards and a
fatal chain-reaction accident on a nearby interstate while I waited for my
crew. How strong were the winds? It was the only time I actually imagined it
might be possible to die from hypothermia in 90+ degree temperatures!

I'd landed (far from a phone in a pre-cell world) at a people-free airport.
Eventually deciding my choices were likely either to wait all night for the
winds to subside, or to attempt to initiate a retrieve before sunset, hunger
(and the fact it was Sunday afternoon and the home field was likely 'moving
toward desertion!') won out so I spent quality cockpit time planning my
cockpit exit and subsequent walk-away, the task spiced somewhat by the ship's
6-foot-long removable canopy. Exit-mission soon-enough accomplished without
unwanted excitement). I then turned the ship 90-degrees to the wind with the
upwind wing UP, flaps negative, left everything in the cockpit, found a nifty,
thru-wall-on-a-rotating-dealybob phone, called home and happily crawled into
the cab of a fuel truck to get out of the wind while awaiting rescue.

Subsequently, the hardest part of the derig wasn't the auto-tow the quarter
mile or so into the lee of some hangars, but the swirling gusts in said 'lee.'
The ship in the winds? Never budged, while I was comforted by fuel truck cab
and the Alfred E. Neuman philosophy of life ("What, me worry?").

Bob W.

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Back in the mid-1960s, we took a 1-26 over to the Cumberland, MD wave camp one weekend. The wind was fairly strong but I don't recall it swirling around that much. At lunchtime, we turned the glider so the wingtip pointed into the wind and tied it down securely. We were almost at the hut about 50 m away when I heard someone yell. When I spun around, the 1-26 was standing vertically on that wingtip. The swirling wind had picked it up and then laid it down on its back. I suspect the rotor was working that day.

Chip Bearden

So there I was, sitting in the old lobby at Cal City waiting for my little brother, Ken, to come back with our 1-26. Only, I was hoping he wouldn’t come back. In fact, I was making radio announcements, in the blind every 20 minutes or so, to warn him that the runway was IFR in blowing sand with 50-60 knot winds and that he needed to land somewhere else.
Just then a Mission Airlines employee runs into the lobby and says there’s a sailplane in their parking lot.
Mission airlines operated out of the big yellow hangar at Cal City. It sounds like a religious organization, and in a sense, I guess it was. Their business was flying explosives around.
Anyway, my little brother was the only one up flying that day, so I figured it must be him and followed airline employee back.
It was Ken, but he wasn’t in their parking lot. He was at the end of the street that leads to their parking lot, which was amazing considering the obstacles along the street and power lines above it. It was clear that he had helicoptered in vertically.
Apparently, he had been on the ground quite some time, with the brakes on and the stick forward, before someone stepped out of the back of the yellow hangar and noticed him. When I got there, he was still in the plane with half a dozen people holding on to it. While he remained in the cockpit (a stupid idea to be sure) the group of us walked the plane forward then lifted it up over the fence (a short fence, long before the words “airport� and “security� had ever been uttered in the same sentence) and onto the airport proper. We tied it down on the cable there before my brother got out.
It ends up, Ken never got my warnings about the wind because his radio quit working. When he got back to the airport and couldn’t see the runway, he decided to land along a perpendicular tiedown strip which was outside the main mass of blowing sand. Boy was that a dumb plan. You can’t land crosswind in those conditions.
The saving grace was that he picked a touchdown point and stuck to it. So, as he blew downwind, he ended up rotating into the wind. Hence the vertical approach to the street 100 yards east.
He had flown up to Bishop and back that day, but the radio wasn’t his only problem. When I asked how high he got, he said he got up to 27,000 feet passing Inyokern on his way north, but every time he checked the altimeter after that it still showed 27,000!
Mike Koerner

This is what you can do with a 70 km/h mistral:

https://youtu.be/fmVZodl5e6A

On Saturday, June 8, 2019 at 12:46:32 PM UTC-4, wrote:
This is what you can do with a 70 km/h mistral:

https://youtu.be/fmVZodl5e6A

No, sir - I swear, I have no idea how that flat spot got on that tire! ;-)

Uli
'AS'