27 crash at Ely?

Someone once insisted there are “holes� in the air. I agree although I don’t think I ever hit a real one yet, especially not close to terrain, but I believe they are, and it is a matter of being at the wrong place at the wrong time, and perhaps at the wrong speed. Nearly every year we loose someone to these holes. Theoretically we can avoid bad fate by never fly close to terrain, but we know it is not possible to always do this if we want to be able to soar.

Ramy

On Friday, July 24, 2020 at 7:11:40 AM UTC-7, Nick Kennedy wrote:
Ramy, When you fly from Nephi Ut to Rifle Co and back and all the way across Utah both ways, its obvious the thermals are working for you. Not against you, with you!
At the mid winter thermal convention I'm sure they talk about you Keith, Jim, Joe, The Mocklers, all you super long distance guys and agree to help you guys out next season.
Eric I never said I was in danger, Over Yuba last week end, I was thousands of feet in the air at the time. But I have had several "Roll into the hill" events, that did frighten me. When ever the bank continues to increase, uncommanded, I get concerned.
After My HG open distance pal Geoff Lyons hit the hill at Boundary Peak Owens Valley, that was really a wake up call for me, on how it can happen if your too close, to anyone.
Reread 5Z's post, he's got the right stuff.
Fly safe in 2020
Nick
T
I was on a hiatus from soaring when Geoff Lyons had his accident. Can someone please tell me what happened?

gkemp wrote on 7/24/2020 8:02 AM:
On Thursday, July 23, 2020 at 10:46:15 PM UTC-7, Ramy wrote:
Same here. I’ve been hearing horror stories of severe upsets, pointing straight down to the rocks, and even completely upside down since I started flying and after 8000 hours of frequent flying in strong Great Basin conditions I feel I am long overdue. Maybe I am just lucky.
I did experience few times the drop on the back side of the ridge when doing one too many circles which certainly got my attention but I always had more than enough margin to recover, otherwise I don’t complete the circle.

Ramy

I was 14,000 feet over Antelope in Siskiyou County in my Nimbus 3 and my right wing was kicked up and I couldn't recover with aileron. I rolled on through and felt like I came out the bottom, glad I was at 14,000 feet.

Wing tip vortex from an airliner going into Medford?

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1

On Thursday, July 23, 2020 at 10:03:12 AM UTC+12, Eric Greenwell wrote:
6PK wrote on 7/22/2020 10:54 AM:
I share this opinion. BTW the main rules are; keep the speed up (so you won't run out of ailron) and stay coordinated.


"Keep the speed up" isn't a rule, it's just encouragement. How can a pilot
determine the flying speed is fast enough? I don't fly faster just because I'm
circling near the slope of a ridge, or mountain face; generally, I think I fly
fast enough to handle the turbulence easily. Coupled with that is moving farther
from the rocks the bumpier the air is. So far, that's worked, but I have no idea
how to put that fuzzy advice into something another pilot can use.

The 'rule' I use and teach is the take your target thermalling speed and add five knots for terrain and five knots for turbulence, plus half the wind speed. So a bumpy thermal in ten knots of wind would have me starting turning fifteen knots faster than normal. As you get the feel for the thermal you might pull those margins in.

Running onto a ridge I arrive with all my safety margins and only ease them back if I'm really confident that things are better than I thought. Like most pilots who fly along ridges on unstable days I have been rolled towards the hill a few times. Nothing outrageous, but it gets the heart rate up when your are holding the stick hard on the stop and still not rolling away. I do notice many pilots aren't really using full control movement. I tell them the reason we have control stops is to give you somewhere to rest your hand while you wait for a response.

Using the rudder is important, but you do not want to get uncoordinated. Full aileron is likely to want a matching amount of rudder though. This varies from glider to glider and with speed, so you need to know your aircraft.

And, I'm sure the speed and distance depends a lot on the type of glider, in
addition to pilot skill, but I can't even tell someone how far I am from the rocks
- no way to measure, so it's just guessing if I mention a number, and the other
pilot is just guessing, too, when he tries to stay that far away.

Judging clearance is a skill that can take a while to learn. Some mountains lack features that indicate scale. Mountains with trees, roads, vehicles etc offer scale that people are used to. Bare rocks don't.

Best to be close enough to be in the lift, but not closer. I only rock polish on weak predictable days where you ned to be close to get lift. Gentle ridge lift or weak anabatic flows. If it's unstable you need a lot more room to allow for those thermals that might roll you into the hill. In thermic conditions I'd allow almost a full turn of space, maybe 150 - 300 meters. That's horizontal clearance. For vertical clearance you need to consider the slope and escape routes. Being close to steep slopes is generally safer than shallow slopes because your escape routes get more clearance sooner.

Maybe I'm just lucky, because I've never experienced the loss of roll control for
more than, say, 20 degrees. Or maybe I scare easily enough, that I've always given
myself enough airspeed and distance. How do I tell the difference between luck and
good piloting?

It's good piloting if you don't crash and bad luck if you do?

Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1

--
Phil Plane
Omarama

On Tuesday, July 21, 2020 at 10:57:02 AM UTC-4, soaringjac wrote:
On Tuesday, July 21, 2020 at 7:40:37 AM UTC-7, 6PK wrote:
On Monday, July 20, 2020 at 8:18:18 PM UTC-7, Tom BravoMike wrote:
On Friday, July 17, 2020 at 3:36:35 PM UTC-5, Brian wrote:
On Friday, July 17, 2020 at 2:00:21 PM UTC-6, wrote:
It’s so alarming to see so many guys on YouTube flying super close to ridges at such low airspeeds.
Youtube Video's often border between deceptive and dangerous.

Pilots may be flying closer than they should. Might be why they are taking a video, or doing so for the video. Camera's do tend to make people do stupid things.

But also Camera's often make it look like they are closer than they really are. Inexperienced pilots watching these might think this is normal and what they should be doing.

Getting some time with and experienced pilot and experiencing it 1st hand so you can see what really is safe and what isn't is invaluable if not life saving.

Brian

How about this looking close to the rocks (5:25)?
https://youtu.be/48P-Y1JF2K0

...but what kind of sunlight readable phone/PNA navigation device were they using? I thought it was impressive.

Looks like XCSoar on a Samsung phone. I run XCSoar on a Samsung Galaxy S7 phone and it is amazing. Super bright and extremely sunlight readable in the bright California sun. Battery life on the phone is at least 5 hours.

Exactly, I use the same setup on Condor 2. Sorry to troll, I am an aspiring COVID glider pilot, hope to get my virtual badges on condor-club.eu soon. Reading your stories and watching the YouTube videos is inspirational. Like others stated, my biggest fear on mountain soaring was how close I had to get to the trees to get lift, that is when I don't box myself into a dead end on the downwind side

On Friday, July 24, 2020 at 10:15:32 PM UTC+1, wrote:

Snip:
" Judging clearance is a skill that can take a while to learn. Some mountains lack features that indicate scale. Mountains with trees, roads, vehicles etc offer scale that people are used to. Bare rocks don't.

Phil Plane
Omarama

A geometrical observation about judging distance from a mountain slope:

If you travel at 60 knots ground speed in a straight line along a mountain slope (or past any point or mast etc) then for every second that it takes for a chosen reference point to pass from 45 degrees ahead to directly opposite then you (not the wing tip) are 100 feet from the reference point. At 90 knots it would be 150 feet and so on. This applies in any plane so it works for crossing over ridges as well.

Obviously you can't judge this exactly but it is surprisingly easy to get in the ball park and I am sure it is the relative rate of motion that experienced mountain pilots intuitively use. I figured it out during my first trip to the Pyrenees after I thought I was flying close to a steep featureless rocky ridge and was overtaken on the inside by a rather small looking Duo Discus. I realised that I needed a way to calibrate my inexperienced judgement where there were no size reference features.

John Galloway

Regarding un-commanded upsets, I’m surprised only two people have so far written to say they have experienced them. Flying out of Mifflin, I’ve had about ten 80+ degree rolls over the last 10 years. They were all on strong (30 kt) ridge days with a bit of wave about, mainly in mid-May, but also in mid-October. Most occurred on Bald Eagle, but some were also on Tussey and Jacks. They mainly happened several thousand feet above ridge top, when I was either climbing to get back to Mifflin, or just loitering until the crosswind subsided a bit.

This is how I described one such experience, which happened at the end of my Diamond Distance flight in October 2010: “As I flew into the FAI finish sector Doris Grove radioed me her congratulations, then told me that I needed to stay airborne for another hour or so, as it was too turbulent and windy to land. Thus began the worst hour of flight I’ve ever experienced. The thermals were vigorous and plentiful this late in the day, and they were combining with the wind to roil the air in a way I’d never seen before. Suddenly the left wing went down, rolling me towards the ridge, fortunately some 2,000 feet below. Full right aileron and full right rudder did nothing to stop the roll, and the bank kept getting steeper. After what seemed like an hour but was probably about 10 seconds, my LS-8 responded and rolled level. But twenty seconds later the process repeated, this time to the right. Rapid jolts shook us violently in between and during the un-commanded rolls. I was more passenger than pilot, in the uncaring grip of an extremely powerful Nature.�

I can categorically state that violent upsets can happen. On strong ridge days, especially when wave is around, I’ve found it prudent to stay well above the ridge top.

-John

------------------

On Thursday, July 23, 2020 at 9:06:49 PM UTC-4, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Nick Kennedy wrote on 7/23/2020 1:27 PM:
Just last Saturday flying out of Nephi Ut in the flats of the valley over Yuba Res I had a thermal kick me into a 80 degree bank.
Full roll control wasn't enough so I pushed to about .1 G and full ruddered it back level. I've done this about 100 times in my soaring career.

Wow! That's never happened to me! In 6000+ hours of flying all over North America
- never have I been pushed more than 20 degrees or so. Just luck can't explain
that difference, so I wonder what we are doing differently that I've never been in
danger, and you've been there 100 times.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1

"Being close to steep slopes is generally safer than shallow slopes because your escape routes get more clearance sooner."

I wonder how steep the terrain was? The Whites can produce brutal air currents. It;s like the blink of an eye and you. Scares you enough to leave some some extra escape room on those days. Terrain is a very complex thing. It seems ( I am speculating here) that the terrain where the accident occurred was not very steep.

Can someone confirm?

I've been upset on wave days in my Stemme.Â* Diving towards the leeward
slope of the mountains east of Albuquerque and pulling up when I felt a
bit of lift, the Stemme rolled uncontrollably to the right and the nose
started down.Â* I responded with forward stick and left aileron and
rudder.Â* The aircraft responded appropriately. This has happened more
than once but is not unexpected - just keep sufficient altitude for the
recovery.

On 7/25/2020 1:17 PM, John Carlyle wrote:
Regarding un-commanded upsets, I’m surprised only two people have so far written to say they have experienced them. Flying out of Mifflin, I’ve had about ten 80+ degree rolls over the last 10 years. They were all on strong (30 kt) ridge days with a bit of wave about, mainly in mid-May, but also in mid-October. Most occurred on Bald Eagle, but some were also on Tussey and Jacks. They mainly happened several thousand feet above ridge top, when I was either climbing to get back to Mifflin, or just loitering until the crosswind subsided a bit.

This is how I described one such experience, which happened at the end of my Diamond Distance flight in October 2010: “As I flew into the FAI finish sector Doris Grove radioed me her congratulations, then told me that I needed to stay airborne for another hour or so, as it was too turbulent and windy to land. Thus began the worst hour of flight I’ve ever experienced. The thermals were vigorous and plentiful this late in the day, and they were combining with the wind to roil the air in a way I’d never seen before. Suddenly the left wing went down, rolling me towards the ridge, fortunately some 2,000 feet below. Full right aileron and full right rudder did nothing to stop the roll, and the bank kept getting steeper. After what seemed like an hour but was probably about 10 seconds, my LS-8 responded and rolled level. But twenty seconds later the process repeated, this time to the right. Rapid jolts shook us violently in between and during the un-commanded rolls. I was more passenger than pilot, in the uncaring grip of an extremely powerful Nature.�

I can categorically state that violent upsets can happen. On strong ridge days, especially when wave is around, I’ve found it prudent to stay well above the ridge top.

-John

------------------

On Thursday, July 23, 2020 at 9:06:49 PM UTC-4, Eric Greenwell wrote:
Nick Kennedy wrote on 7/23/2020 1:27 PM:
Just last Saturday flying out of Nephi Ut in the flats of the valley over Yuba Res I had a thermal kick me into a 80 degree bank.
Full roll control wasn't enough so I pushed to about .1 G and full ruddered it back level. I've done this about 100 times in my soaring career.
Wow! That's never happened to me! In 6000+ hours of flying all over North America
- never have I been pushed more than 20 degrees or so. Just luck can't explain
that difference, so I wonder what we are doing differently that I've never been in
danger, and you've been there 100 times.

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1

--
Dan, 5J

On 7/25/2020 1:17 PM, John Carlyle wrote:
Regarding un-commanded upsets, I’m surprised only two people have so far
written to say they have experienced them. Flying out of Mifflin, I’ve had
about ten 80+ degree rolls over the last 10 years. They were all on strong
(30 kt) ridge days with a bit of wave about, mainly in mid-May, but also in
mid-October...

OK, I'll chime in here with some observations and thoughts...most of my stick
time gained in/above CO's Rocky Mountains out of Boulder.

Uncommanded rolls - my largest excursion was in rotor about halfway in from
the Front Range (CO) to the continental divide, easily estimated (from
instrument screws relative to the horizon) at 45-degrees, and counteracted by
hard (full?) opposite stick along with "a sustained (definitely!) full-rudder
stomp" by way of encouraging the down-swinging tip to reverse its motion. That
particular instance "got my attention" simply because: 1) it took a finite
amount of time to reach max-roll condition; and 2) I'd never rolled a plane
and had no desire to just then, despite thousands of feet of ground clearance.
15 meter 1st-generation glass.

Uncommanded pitch excursions - a tougher call in terms of "largest" simply
because - for most glider pilots - any "serious view of the ground" through
the forward canopy almost certainly feels like "going straight down, a claim
supported by ~2k hours in large-deflection-only flapped ships (no landing
spoilers) and plenty of "written stuff" seen in "Soaring" mag from pilots new
to 'em (particularly from "the Dick Schreder/HP-series" era. MY HP-14 had a
descent angle of an estimated 45-degrees along with an appropriately steep
nose-down angle in even the slightest headwind. I can't recall ever getting
uncommandedly pitched down to a similar degree, and the V-tailed HP was
peculiarly prone to pitching (generally smoothly) nose-down in the presence of
strong thermals.

Most violent air - my 1st microburst encounter. Seriously frightening/ugly!
Prolly a 50:50 crash/no-crash situation were I Tom Hanks in the movie
Groundhog Day. Duration was from ~2k'agl to ~3'agl, most of the time with me
unable to continuously focus my eyes on anything before the next
air-induced-jolt defocused things. Uncertain whether I was going to
overshoot/undershoot a 3,000' long field until on v-e-r-y short final. Had
actual diffyoogulty *locating* the field due to violence-induced focusing
impairment. The whole dismal affair was sufficiently stressful/lengthy that a
corner of my brain wanted the stress to "just end" *while* it was
occurring...closest I ever came to resignation to an unwanted fate.

Only once did I ever put myself in a position where (briefly - but Seriously
Alarmingly!) the very real possibility of hitting a ridge seemed
"not-vanishingly small." (Kids, definitely not recommended!) Caused by
"prematurely-circling" toward a ridge in sinking air that I'd presumed was
going to be rising. Seriously Stupid, all around.

Bob W.

---
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