Video of off-field landing from cockpit

On Oct 18, 2:08*pm, mattm wrote:
On Oct 18, 2:03*pm, mattm wrote:





On Oct 18, 1:03*pm, Bruno wrote:

Hey everyone. We had a fun weekend up in Utah with many gliders up in
the air enjoying the amazing fall colors and mountain scenery. *At the
end of Friday's flight I decided to extend the flight and go play out
in the weak wave lift in the valley northeast of the Logan airport. It
was fun until it stopped being fun...

For those of you who have not yet enjoyed an off-field landing, this
video shows the final 6 minutes before the landout and then landing in
the farmer's alfalfa field. It does a good job of showing the desire
to try to stretch and make it home but in the end making the correct
decision and landing safely short of the airport in a good field.
Please note the field was chosen and looked over well before the gear
came down.

Other than a few green leaves that needed to be washed away from the
bottom of the glider it was no worse for wear and I am thrilled to
have the video to share with others of what the experience of landing
in a field is like.

Please watch the video in the highest resolution your computer and
connection can handle. *It was shot in 1080HD and at that resolution
you should be able to read all the numbers on the instruments. *The
camera is a Canon HF20 with a fish eye lens which does a great job of
distorting my face... *It is mounted on 1" ball RAM mount
adjustable arms. *I have a custom voltage reducer to take a full 12
volt 7 amp/hr battery and lower it to 8.4 volts so I get 7+ hours of
battery life. The standard camera batteries only last a few hours max
so this is necessary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBfNA5nhGQM&hd=1

Here is the igc file - it wasn't an impressive flight but you can see
the trace at the end where the video shows the final moments.http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0....html?flightId...

Thanks for watching and hope you enjoy.

Bruno Vassel IV - B4http://www.youtube.com/user/bviv

Excellent video. *Wish I had this available last month when I was
giving a land out
talk. *There's a few things that you should learn from the experience,
though
(shouldn't there always be?), as suggested by the likes of Tim Welles
and
Kai Gertsen:

1. turn off the radio when you're low -- it's just a distraction.
Also,
as Doug Jacobs likes to say, if you can do anything else while
thermalling,
you're not thinking about thermalling hard enough. *You can turn it
back
on after you land and tell everyone you're all right.
2. pick the field while you still have room to change your mind, and
when
you can see it properly. *You picked a field ahead of yourself a ways,
and lucked
out that it was a good field (it was into the sun, too, so it had to
be hard to
see it well). *I tried that last year and landed in chest-high barley
(ouch).
3. pick the field at a more reasonable altitude. *300 feet (100m for
the rest
of the world) is more like the altitude you should be turning base to
final.
It's a little hard to see, but it seems you had good fields under you
at 800 feet,
and you had a good chance to look at them while you were scratching
(which is a good exception to DJ's rule).

There's a bunch of good presentations on off field landings (and lots
of
other great soaring stuff) at Doug Jacob's collection of stuff for
the
US Team camps:http://www.dragonnorth.com/djpresentations/index.html

-- Matt

Also, I don't want to sound negative in all this. *You did do stuff
right, too --
checklist, take the safe option to go into the field (rather than
stretching
too far), and local field knowledge. *As you said on the radio, you
were very
close to glide slope, but you broke off while you still had time to
maneuver.
There's too many NTSB reports of pilots just hoping for that last 80
feet to
materialize...

-- Matt- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Fun video of pleasant ending to a flight that almost made it- sorta.
Bruno really was 500 to 600 low to make the field if one allows a
decent safety margin. I get the impression that he might have gone for
it if he was a couple hundred feet higher.
The sink he sees when leaving his last "thermal" shows why this can be
folly.
The concern I have is giving the impression that this last few minutes
is how we should fly such
that others use this as an example.
Everything is in his favor. Benign terrain, not much wind, not a lot
of sink(or lift).
I would bet a tighter circle with a bit more flap would have improved
his escape possibilities. Looked like
he was bouncing off bubbles without trying to tighten up in best lift.
That said, without feeling the seat, he could have been doing it
quite well.
All that said, deciding to quit at 3 or 400 ft when it hasn't worked
all the way down, is from my experience, a poor
thing to do for a couple reasons. First surprises happen and options
become very limited. Second, the positive outcome makes
the pilot comfortable with doing it, leading to lower and lower
quitting points. I've pointed this out to a number of my competition
friends over the years. 2 proved me right within a year by crashing
with low decision to land being a significant factor.
BTW- another observation- How many times does he scan outside the
circle? I know camera angle is deceiving.
Enough preaching.
Nice video
Fun to watch
Don't use as a training film.
UH