Vermont Fatalities Today

On Thursday, August 30, 2018 at 1:02:30 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Thursday, August 30, 2018 at 12:24:58 AM UTC-4, wrote:
Three people were killed in the crash of a 2-32 today.

This is an especially sad situation. The pilot was Don Post, the owner of Stowe Soaring, was a good friend to all of the glider pilots flying out of Morrisville Stowe airport. For the last 10 years Don had been the backbone of the soaring movement at MVL.

We of course, also want to remember all the lost souls and their family members as well.

For those of you who fly 2-32s who were not checked out in them by a pilot as competent as Roy McMaster, who checked me out in 1967, it is important to remember that the 2-32 can be an especially lethal sailplane to fly that has often ended up killing the pilot, and on some occasions the passengers in the rear seat as well!

A crucial factor is the laminar flow NACA airfoils that were used, that results in most stalls falling into a spin immediately. It is especially important to fly patterns well above the stall speed, at least 70 mph, and if you plan to use full dive brakes to fly the pattern at 80 mph, never pulling full dive brakes below about 60 mph as at this airspeed attempting to recover from a rapid descent results in the tail slamming down hard: this fact can be discovered by simply looking at the last bulkhead in the tail of most 2-32s, that has either been replaced or doubled over.

As a former FBO who owned five 2-32s over a 16 year period, at the 1971 SSA convention I asked Bernie Carris, the test pilot at Schweitzer, why were there so many 2-32 spin ins. What he then told the group attending the FBO meeting that I believe was published in Soaring Magazine was that the 2-32 had a peculiar spin characteristic: after entering a fully developed spin, that might take more than one turn to get to, the 2-32 can then take up to two turns to recover, and if a recovery is not held for two turns, upon restarting it will take two more turns to recover. Of course, at low altitude, with typical spin entries starting with the ship appearing to roll over onto its back, there may not be enough time to even recover the spin.

As a former FBO whose knowledge of these peculiar flight characteristics haunts me to this day, it was not my mission in life to expound on these sorts of issues after leaving the business 36 years ago. One of the real problems that the SSA and the FAA has today, is the fact that the old timers like myself, who are aware of the Achilles tendons that some gliders posses, do not have the time to go around pointing out the hidden dangers in the sport including the hidden dangers that only become obvious when you are also running a shop that repairs the sailplanes you sell, which in the 70s included Blanik L-13s, that had a pair of Achilles tendons that kept on bringing back to us ships that CFIGs were flying in which they landed with flaps against our advice and when low, instead of pushing the dive brakes off, pushed the flaps, off, a mistake you can make in any flapped sailplane by the way, but seemed to be a bigger problem in Blaniks than others because of the close proximity of the flap and dive brake handles. These sorts of issues, like the fact that around 30% of the ASH-26e owners on their first flights thought the brakes were locked when they were not, is just another example of this sort of human interface problem that some gliders have that repeat regularly or on first flights do not get properly publicized, one of the most common accidents that often ends up in fatalities being the canopy flopping on take off, which after another triple fatality in a 2-32 accident Schweitzer determined did not prevent a glider pilot from controlling the glider while ignoring the canopy completely and yet there is a video on the web showing how to fly a 1-34 while holding the canopy with one hand and flying with the other, and by the way, the gliders that end up crashing with pilots attempting to close their canopies instead of flying them, turn out to include other two seaters as well.


Stephen Fried

A very sad day indeed. Don was a friend. I was his guest a few times and we flew together a number of times. Don loved everything about flying. He was fun to be around. It is so difficult to accept this loss. Unfortunately the losses keep coming.

Andrzej