tow rope brake practice crash, what can we learn...

On Jul 14, 6:45*pm, Darryl Ramm wrote:
On Jul 13, 10:07*pm, Bruce Hoult wrote:





On Jul 14, 2:52*pm, Kevin Christner wrote:

Can anyone tell me if they've had an actual rope break below ~200 or
even ~400ft. *I have never, ever heard of one.

I had a rope break 12 days ago. The glider moved about 50 ft before
coming to rest.

I've seen several similar breaks over the years.

As far as I know, our club has had precisely one rope break in the air
in the 25 years I've been a member. It happened at around 1500 or 2000
ft and the glider end or the rope and the rings dropped into an
electrical substation, which caused them to become a little unhappy.

I don't know why people are talking about landing downwind from 200ft.
When I've done practice rope breaks it's been about a 90 degree turn
onto a short downwind for the crosswind runway, but almost invariably
when you get onto base for that you figure you've got plenty of height
to turn that into a close in downwind for the active runway.
Certainly, if there's a reasonable wind (20 - 25 knots, say) then it's
easy (and better) to go right around and land upwind even if you land
a fair way up the active runway and/or still at a 20 or 30 degree
angle to it.

Bruce, because many gliderports have shorter single runways. You may
be thinking of operating off long runways at larger airports with
cross runways.

We operate off approximately 450m of grass which forms the long edge
of a right angle triangle. We do have a lot of width or varying
directions available, at the cost of a shorter available distance, but
it's hardly huge.

(the grass is surrounded by tarsealed taxiways (decommissioned
runways) which are theoretically available for undershoot/overrun, at
the cost of a "shout", but past that there is a fence and then km of
very unlandable retail complexes and houses)