Dear Burt

I had a recent very positive experience from an SSA
X-C instructor. What a blast of fresh air. Totally
thorough, totally professional, and never nitpickety.

I'm thinking the SSA Master X-C program is great. And
I look forward to some time in the mountains with
the Carl Herold's and Rolf Peterson's of the world.

But I also get a LOT from reading and listening about
X-C flights of non-instructors. ENSURE for 24 hours before the
flight to help with "relief" issues. Cautions about
oxygen use and importance. The continual focus on landouts
throughout X-C flight and the extensive landout preparation.

Really great stuff from a lot of sources. Although I agree
about the SSA Master X-C program, the info from non-instructors
is great too, I think. Just like I think getting two pilots
together for a flight is sometimes more enlightening than
flying repeatedly with the same old instructor.

In article ,
Steve Hill wrote:
It's nice to hear others question the validity of useless statistics. How
many privately owned L-13's or 2-33 are there in the US and how many of
those ever embark on an cross country flight??

If all you want to do is train in 2-33's and L-13's and fly around within a
5 to 10 mile area of your local airport...then I'd agree you are at less
risk in some ways and more in others.

That's not what I do however. I take off and leave and come back generally
many hours later. Are there risks?? Damn straight. But I accept them and
understand them and work my butt off to have a logical plan to deal with
them. And hope that I never need to excercise any of those plans, based on
my ability to evaluate my own risk/reward equation and to always remember
that flying is, at the end of the day a very personal reward.

In a way, I believe you have cemented my view that in many cases, students
are not receiving the information that helps them to attain their goals, and
so they have to get it from osmosis, instead of an instructor. The SSA
Master Instructor program is a great idea as well as the mentoring programs
that some areas are fortunate enough to have...we need a ton more of that,
from qualified sources. And again, not to sound like a broken record, but I
believe that the training must become more dynamic and less static. The
pearls of wisdom accrued over the years need to have a better venue to be
shared.


That's about it from me.



Steve.






--

------------+
Mark J. Boyd

At 01:30 15 February 2005, Mark James Boyd wrote:
I think you are right. I think that the glider examiners
could come
together to define a better standard for 'simulated
off-field
landings' that perhaps borrows terminolgy from the
airplane 'short-field landing' stuff.

As long as the focus of such short field landings is
on
'near-minimum energy' and 'touchdown spot' this would
be
good. These are good skills. Stopping after that
within any
actual particular distance is of no interest, however,
since anyone can mash the brakes.

I agree with the first part of this but stopping as
quickly as possible is also important. When landing
on an unknown surface, and all field landings are that,
the greater the chance of hitting something hidden
in the grass/crop like deep ruts or rocks. Making the
ground run as short as possible reduces the chances
of that. I know that it does not eliminate it altogether.
Of course the minimum stopping distance is reduced
by ensuring a minimum touchdown speed which goes right
back to managing the speed on the approach.

So the normal landing being a momentum management task,
and having the
off field landing be a different test for minimum landing
speed and
touchdown point task, seems quite reasonable. Putting
them together,
however, doesn't make sense to me. Either you are
landing with
minimum energy, or you are landing with extra energy
and using it
to stop at a certain point. Never both.

And I would not recommend trying to combine them in
real life, either.
One is for one thing, the other is for something else.
A long ground
roll gives a lot more control (using spoiler AND brake)
than
a slightly long 'minimum energy' landing followed by
attempts at maximum
braking that fail and end up rear-ending someone.

In article ,
T o d d P a t t i s t wrote:
Martin Eiler wrote:

As long as we acknowledge what skill we are testing
(managing a rollout), I'm OK with it. It's just a
skill
that I think it is odd to test when IMHO a more important
skill (low energy accurate touchdown) is not directly
tested.
--

------------+
Mark J. Boyd

I don't understand the broken tail booms bit or what
that has to do with short rollouts. We do teach and
test for short rolls in the UK and I have no recollection
of a large number of tail boom breaks

At 02:04 16 February 2005, Andreas Maurer wrote:
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:05:41 +0100, 'Bert Willing'
wrote:

Still, in an off-airfield landing you need the shortest
possible rollout.
And that should be teached and tested.

I guess we both know where the broken tail booms on
US Twin 2's come
from, don't we?


Bye
Andreas

The remark was targeted to the opposite - if you do a main wheel landing
with the excess energy needed to taxi to a stopping point 2 miles away, you
have a good chance to enter a PIO :-)))

--
Bert Willing

ASW20 "TW"


"Don Johnstone" a écrit dans
le message de news: ...
I don't understand the broken tail booms bit or what
that has to do with short rollouts. We do teach and
test for short rolls in the UK and I have no recollection
of a large number of tail boom breaks

At 02:04 16 February 2005, Andreas Maurer wrote:
On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:05:41 +0100, 'Bert Willing'
wrote:

Still, in an off-airfield landing you need the shortest
possible rollout.
And that should be teached and tested.

I guess we both know where the broken tail booms on
US Twin 2's come
from, don't we?


Bye
Andreas