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  #11  
Old January 27th 18, 06:42 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
jfitch
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On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 8:28:39 AM UTC-8, Charlie M. (UH & 002 owner/pilot) wrote:
OK, question for everyone to ponder.

Many years ago we had a "backside of the ridge" day at Ridge Soaring. Last turnpoint was Williamsport, return to Ridge Soaring.
Just before the airport, the ridge rises a bunch, but we were on the wrong side (KS in the lead, SM second, me a little behind and a little lower......).
Suddenly, KS made a hard right turn towards the ridge followed by SM. I figured they knew something I didn't so, either we get through or 3 broken ASW-20's in one spot.
There was a low saddle just before the rising terrain, with some ridge speed (which we all had) it was to make sure you cleared the clothesline in someone's side yard.
Then, terrain follow down the backside to the finish, from memory, we were likely 800' above the airport 1-2 miles from the finish with plenty of speed.

No issues, perfectly safe.
If the current idea of a hard deck was in place, would we all be landed out?
Ground clearance was "maybe" a wingspan but with plenty of "zoomie speed" if need be.

Just asking.......;-)


Without knowing more, hard to say. It is interesting that you thought you might die, but followed them anyway . "No issues, perfectly safe" - after the fact. In a ridgey area, the ridges would typically be poking up through the hard deck, so crossing one would not be a violation. Low saves on the top of ridges are not what the hard deck is intended to non-reward. If the hoped for lift does not materialize, you can normally dive away to either side and safety. Low saves in the bottom of a rocky or forested valley are the target. That is simply Roulette - if the hoped for lift materializes you survive and win the day, if not you break the glider and yourself. I don't care (in the abstract) about the latter, but the former is a reward for risk.
  #12  
Old January 27th 18, 06:48 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
John Cochrane[_3_]
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No. Proposed hard deck is over the valley floor. Ridges stick out, and you're free to do what you want over the hills. The hard deck fairs in to the finish cylinder if there is one, or has a hole in it allowing line finish if not. I can't think of a simple implementable way to remove contest point incentive for silly stuff in the mountains.

For others who might be inspired by this story, one should point out that shooting saddles with a wingspan or less, using stored energy, is generally a dicey maneuver, and many contest pilots have come to grief or an untimely end trying it. Following great pilots just a little bit lower, when you don't know their plan, and when those pilots clear obstacles by a wingspan or less, is also an iffy tactic. If you following KS and SM, recognize that they often know of one field up around the corner up ahead, which has room for one glider. You don't know where that field is.

John Cochrane
  #13  
Old January 27th 18, 08:00 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Dave Nadler
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On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 8:28:39 AM UTC-8, Charlie M. (UH & 002 owner/pilot) wrote:
I figured they knew something I didn't so,
either we get through or 3 broken ASW-20's in one spot.


Absolutely incredibly stupid.

On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 12:42:33 PM UTC-5, jfitch wrote:
It is interesting that you thought you might die, but followed them anyway .


On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 12:48:16 PM UTC-5, John Cochrane wrote:
Following great pilots just a little bit lower, when you don't know their
plan, and when those pilots clear obstacles by a wingspan or less, is also
an iffy tactic.


If you are not absolutely clear how people get killed blindly following
other pilots, you may want to read:
http://www.nadler.com/public/Nadler_...g_May_1987.pdf

PS: One of the experts mentioned above was the pilot that made a wee mistake
about which ridge was which in the above-linked article...
  #14  
Old January 27th 18, 09:08 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
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, I'm landing NOW". Each step of each flight, think "Where's the next field, and how far can I go before I might not be able to reach it ?" This is pretty basic, but we haven't been flying this way."

Dave thanks for posting your article. I had read it before bur forgot about it's existence. Fantastic practical insight directly applicable.

If I was to try and distill one single reason for why we see guys getting themselves in a pickle today, irregardless of soaring location, and irregardless of the forensics of their accident be it stall spin or connecting with a rock face, I would have to say it is because of the tremendous performance of our midern ships.

Many of the guys racing today have never experienced what its like to race a low/mid performance machines, and hence they have been so conditioned to the great long legs and benign handling of modern ships that they have never learned the lessons needed when flying those poorer ships. Namely, before committing to a path, always having a way out (a field, an option, an alternative), learning to outland with minimum energy and minimum rolling distance. Expecting the unexpected, "what do I do if that ridge isn't working?" Etc.

Secondly, due to "perceived" performance, guys either don't know how to "change gears" or put it off till no options exist. The last resort gear change I am referring to is pure survival mode. Yes guys mostly know how to slow it up when conditions get iffy, but do they know how to give-it-up while not giving up on flying the bird. Theres a time to stop racing and start scratching, theres a time to stop scratching and start landing, and if both of those times have past unrecognized, theres a time to put her down in a CONTROLLED MANNER with minimum energy knowing your gonna bust up the machine seriously, but you may save your ass in the process.

I have found that pilots who have a healthy amount of xc experience in lesser performing ships tend to be safer more conservative fliers once they upgrade (exceptions exist). They have mostly had to forsee getting across rough stretches of terrain with crappy L/D. They have experienced a bunch of true outlandings, I'm talking about bean fields not away-from-home airports, and they have been forced to make "gear changing" decisions much earlier and much more frequently than is necessary with the better performing ships.

All of this experience has conditioned them to make better, earlier decisions.
Dan
  #15  
Old January 27th 18, 09:36 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Andy Blackburn[_3_]
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On Friday, January 26, 2018 at 2:01:01 PM UTC-8, John Cochrane wrote:

Specified ridge routes, where ridge soaring less than 500 feet over the valley floor, are carved out. The SUA stops short of the ridge in such areas..

John Cochrane


I'll nitpick the carve-out for ridge routes less than 500' above the valley floor. You don't want pilots stuck between the ridge and an SUA that they can't get over. Also, how low off the top of the ridge are you going to carve? Not every ridge day lets you fly over the crest. Once you make exceptions it means that someone has to go through and design the exceptions. Plus, ridge routes aren't the only gotchas.

There are other specific areas and situations I can think of that are problematic. Some of you will recognize them if you've flow the area. They are mostly equivalent to the Lake Tahoe example Jon mentioned - unlandable escarpments where the actual landout options require clearing the edge of the escarpment: 1) The Scofield Island turnpoint on the Wasatch plateau and most of the territory to the north of it in the Nephi task area, 2) the 20 miles of unlandable plateau to the west of the Wayne Wonderland turnpoint to the east of Parowan, 3) much of the escarpment south of Brian Head where the landouts are either a long glide down to Kanab, or though a canyon out to Cedar City or Hurricane, 4) most of the territory east of Mount Shasta as well as the wide, low pass that gets you to the home valley in the Montague task area, 4) the entire upper valley on the other side of the ridge by New Castle - if you shoot the gap you have an easy glide to the airport, but you have to clear the gap. It's a common finish route so you have to use the lower airport valley as the floor of the hard deck, but that leaves the upper valley without a hard deck. I've been low there and at least one contest accident was there IIRC.

Now, you could ignore these areas and just leave them without hard decks so that you don't have to have an expert committee of local racing pilots go through the entire task areas crafting custom SUA files for every single gotcha. In any case all of this would require a lot of education of pilots that being above the hard deck is not the same as having a landout option. I've done the landout option exercise using GlidePlan to set minimum altitude rings for the entire Montague task area based on a reasonable glide angle (35:1) to a known landing spot (mostly airports, but also landouts I scouted to fill the "no landing option" gaps). It's a sobering exercise - particularly when the task area is significantly unlandable). It also leads to a map that requires careful study to use effectively in real-world situations - situations where your mental energy might be better spent on other things..

While I wouldn't recommend it, theoretically we could contemplate setting SUAs so that every square mile of a task area always had a glide to a known good landing spot - or even an airport. It's how I typically fly and I know I pay a price for it competing with pilots who don't. Many times I watch other pilots dive into areas where I know there are no good landing options, only to connect with 8-knot climbs while I'm taking 2.5 knots back where it's safe - for me at least. I don't find any thrill in contemplating getting away with that kind of dice-rolling.

More broadly, since I've actually attempted this exercise myself as described above, I don't think it's all that easy for pilots to interpret a set of SUA's that are set up to regulate altitude from a top-down-view moving map display. Most SUA's are set to restrict horizontal position. We have class A, but that's the same everywhere so there's no looking at your altitude, then the map to find the local hard deck, followed by a search for the next lowest step, then back out to try to determine if the lower step that might buy you an extra 500-1000' in hard deck clearance actually takes you away from landout options, rather than towards them. I could easily see uneven terrain that encourages pilots to "circle the drain" of SUAs into areas that are more hazardous rather than less.

Lastly, mostly these ideas are intended to deal with relatively rare behavior and (if I hear people correctly) not even an attempt to stop that behavior, but simply the competitive impact of dice-rolling to win. If that's the case more selective and focused use of SUAs for specific risky behavior at specific locations that has an obvious competitive benefit might be a better way to go. Sergio's elevator at Lake Tahoe is pretty clearly one that I just won't do unless I'm high enough to avoid a lake landing. I've seen many flight traces of pilots who effectively committed to ditching if the elevator wasn't working - or their motor working (that one's a whole new thread).

It's not really clear to me whether there is even clarity on the objective here. It could be: 1) Discourage pilots from ever getting out of glide range to an airport, 2) Discourage pilots from ever getting out of glide range of a laudable spot, 3) Discourage pilots from circling too low in an attempt to make a save for points (but only for cases where the pilot doesn't also care about avoiding a retrieve, in which case a penalty wouldn't matter), 4) Stop pilots from placing well in contests from doing 1, 2, or 3 - but which one? For the record, I think 1, 2 or 3 either aren't practical to implement or aren't ineffective incentives, and 4 depends on on having some sort of sense of which types of behavior are specific, intentional acts of risk taking for competitive advantage. I don't think making a low save falls into the category of an intentional act very often. If you're that low most often your day is shot. The Lake Tahoe example is a notable exception - maybe we should focus on that.

It's a complex topic.

Andy Blackburn
9B
  #16  
Old January 27th 18, 10:35 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Charlie M. (UH & 002 owner/pilot)
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I made it sound a bit dramatic, my bad.
If you know the site, I assumed we would ridge run around the high point and then pop over and to the airport. The debrief later stated that it would make for a "too fast" decent that close to the airport (sorta like New Castle coming up from Blacksburg on the ridge, don't terrain follow to the deck since you WILL exceed redline).
Where we went over, we could have comfortably cleared the higher bits on either side of the saddle, the saddle allowed no slowing down and a shallower decent on the back side.
The post was more of a, would we be landed?

Anyway, got an answer, thanks.
  #17  
Old January 27th 18, 10:48 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
[email protected]
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.....PS: One of the experts mentioned above was the pilot that made a wee mistake
about which ridge was which in the above-linked article...

Dave I'd go easy on the naming of names here. You might end up with a few fingers pointed back your way regarding "wee little mistakes" made in the past lol.
  #18  
Old January 27th 18, 10:48 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Bob Whelan[_3_]
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On 1/27/2018 12:00 PM, Dave Nadler wrote:

Germane lead-in info snipped...

If you are not absolutely clear how people get killed blindly following
other pilots, you may want to read:
http://www.nadler.com/public/Nadler_...g_May_1987.pdf


Well worth (re-)absorbing; I just did it for about the tenth time. And at the
(probably WAY too high) risk of having sardonic humor be completely
misinterpreted...arithmetic says there was a 1.8% *improvement* from 1985 to
1986 in that particular regional contest's broken ship safety stats. (1985 -
4/31; 1986 5/45) So today, 30-some years later and continuing the same
improvement rate, that particular contest should be darn near 60%
"ship-safer," no? Insurance rates plummet wildly!!! (Not!)

More seriously, IMO the rather amorphous thought, "I NEED to make an active
decision!" if incorporated into every soaring pilot's general arsenal, would
go a long way to improving our collective safety record. (I forget whether it
was former World Champion AJ Smith or George Moffat who pithily said
[paraphrasing]: If you're not making at least one active decision every 60
seconds, you're [losing time, screwing the pooch, etc.].)

*Actively* making the decision to (say) switch from "doing something else" to
"entering my pre-planned pattern for my pre-selected field NOW!" is the
pilot's responsibility...to him/herself, to their family, to their friends, to
the soaring community at large, to the ship. (Even so, I doubt whether repair
shop proprietors need fear going out of business from lack of work.) Whether
"NOW" occurs at (say) 800' agl above the home field or somewhere else is by
comparison relatively unimportant. Hard deck (whether yours or contest
management's), terrain-induced concern or fear, instructor's number, whatever
- getting into the habit of ALWAYS making that sort of in-flight decision
each flight - maybe even more than once, as you scratch along - surely is more
safety important (to Joe Pilot anyway) than is not forgetting to lower the
gear, something about which every retract pilot tries to obsess over at one
time or another in their flying career. Who'd'a thunk a shoe company ad would
ever have real-world applicability to the soaring world? Just do it! :-)

Bob W.

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  #19  
Old January 27th 18, 11:37 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
jfitch
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On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 12:36:09 PM UTC-8, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Friday, January 26, 2018 at 2:01:01 PM UTC-8, John Cochrane wrote:

Specified ridge routes, where ridge soaring less than 500 feet over the valley floor, are carved out. The SUA stops short of the ridge in such areas.

John Cochrane


I'll nitpick the carve-out for ridge routes less than 500' above the valley floor. You don't want pilots stuck between the ridge and an SUA that they can't get over. Also, how low off the top of the ridge are you going to carve? Not every ridge day lets you fly over the crest. Once you make exceptions it means that someone has to go through and design the exceptions. Plus, ridge routes aren't the only gotchas.

There are other specific areas and situations I can think of that are problematic. Some of you will recognize them if you've flow the area. They are mostly equivalent to the Lake Tahoe example Jon mentioned - unlandable escarpments where the actual landout options require clearing the edge of the escarpment: 1) The Scofield Island turnpoint on the Wasatch plateau and most of the territory to the north of it in the Nephi task area, 2) the 20 miles of unlandable plateau to the west of the Wayne Wonderland turnpoint to the east of Parowan, 3) much of the escarpment south of Brian Head where the landouts are either a long glide down to Kanab, or though a canyon out to Cedar City or Hurricane, 4) most of the territory east of Mount Shasta as well as the wide, low pass that gets you to the home valley in the Montague task area, 4) the entire upper valley on the other side of the ridge by New Castle - if you shoot the gap you have an easy glide to the airport, but you have to clear the gap. It's a common finish route so you have to use the lower airport valley as the floor of the hard deck, but that leaves the upper valley without a hard deck. I've been low there and at least one contest accident was there IIRC.

Now, you could ignore these areas and just leave them without hard decks so that you don't have to have an expert committee of local racing pilots go through the entire task areas crafting custom SUA files for every single gotcha. In any case all of this would require a lot of education of pilots that being above the hard deck is not the same as having a landout option. I've done the landout option exercise using GlidePlan to set minimum altitude rings for the entire Montague task area based on a reasonable glide angle (35:1) to a known landing spot (mostly airports, but also landouts I scouted to fill the "no landing option" gaps). It's a sobering exercise - particularly when the task area is significantly unlandable). It also leads to a map that requires careful study to use effectively in real-world situations - situations where your mental energy might be better spent on other things.

While I wouldn't recommend it, theoretically we could contemplate setting SUAs so that every square mile of a task area always had a glide to a known good landing spot - or even an airport. It's how I typically fly and I know I pay a price for it competing with pilots who don't. Many times I watch other pilots dive into areas where I know there are no good landing options, only to connect with 8-knot climbs while I'm taking 2.5 knots back where it's safe - for me at least. I don't find any thrill in contemplating getting away with that kind of dice-rolling.

More broadly, since I've actually attempted this exercise myself as described above, I don't think it's all that easy for pilots to interpret a set of SUA's that are set up to regulate altitude from a top-down-view moving map display. Most SUA's are set to restrict horizontal position. We have class A, but that's the same everywhere so there's no looking at your altitude, then the map to find the local hard deck, followed by a search for the next lowest step, then back out to try to determine if the lower step that might buy you an extra 500-1000' in hard deck clearance actually takes you away from landout options, rather than towards them. I could easily see uneven terrain that encourages pilots to "circle the drain" of SUAs into areas that are more hazardous rather than less.

Lastly, mostly these ideas are intended to deal with relatively rare behavior and (if I hear people correctly) not even an attempt to stop that behavior, but simply the competitive impact of dice-rolling to win. If that's the case more selective and focused use of SUAs for specific risky behavior at specific locations that has an obvious competitive benefit might be a better way to go. Sergio's elevator at Lake Tahoe is pretty clearly one that I just won't do unless I'm high enough to avoid a lake landing. I've seen many flight traces of pilots who effectively committed to ditching if the elevator wasn't working - or their motor working (that one's a whole new thread).

It's not really clear to me whether there is even clarity on the objective here. It could be: 1) Discourage pilots from ever getting out of glide range to an airport, 2) Discourage pilots from ever getting out of glide range of a laudable spot, 3) Discourage pilots from circling too low in an attempt to make a save for points (but only for cases where the pilot doesn't also care about avoiding a retrieve, in which case a penalty wouldn't matter), 4) Stop pilots from placing well in contests from doing 1, 2, or 3 - but which one? For the record, I think 1, 2 or 3 either aren't practical to implement or aren't ineffective incentives, and 4 depends on on having some sort of sense of which types of behavior are specific, intentional acts of risk taking for competitive advantage. I don't think making a low save falls into the category of an intentional act very often. If you're that low most often your day is shot. The Lake Tahoe example is a notable exception - maybe we should focus on that.

It's a complex topic.

Andy Blackburn
9B


Andy, I hate it when you are the voice of reason . My motivation is to prevent having to fly blatantly unsafely in order to feel competitive. I don't do it, and I'm not competitive. There are guys who are always going to be faster than me on skill alone, I accept that. There are other guys who are willing to take far more chances and are faster because of it. There is some overlap in the two groups. I've become pretty good at predicting which of the latter will eventually come to grief (a skill honed in the old hang gliding days when I lost perhaps 20 friends in just a few years).

Dan's point from before is that contests are usually won with consistency, but the way the scoring is done (as stated in Dave's article) if a guy gets a lucky and unsafe save on a day when many landout safely, that one event can change the finish order dramatically. Maybe changes to the scoring methods address the problem more simply. For example throwing out the best and worst score for each pilot, or using a low points scoring system as they do in sailing regattas. That tends to reward consistent performance above one lucky or unlucky day. There is always the possibility that one pilot will win with a series of unlikely and dangerous low saves, but that is far less probable than the order changing due to just one.

Sergio's elevator is a good example. I know several pilots who will attempt to utilize that when the rest of us will be in Carson. I also know one pilot who died there trying, and another who didn't make it out of the basin. I've seen a number exit through Spooner barely clearing the tops of the cars on the highway, a few more feet of sink and they'd have had a mid air with a truck. There are other ways to address that simpler than a hard deck, for example a a steering turn at the elevator at say 10,300 ft min. Perhaps at many contests, addressing a half dozen problematic areas in that way would be sufficient, any particular task might only involve one or two. Another at Truckee is returning through the Verdi gap from the north east. Again there are a few pilots I know that will come through there very low hoping for ridge lift, their backup plan is the lake at Boca. Not my cup of tea. A steering turn there would help, but it might still be practical (though foolhardy) to go through low, do a low save at Boca International, hit the steering turn at Verdi peak, and get home.
  #20  
Old January 28th 18, 01:51 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Tango Eight
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On Saturday, January 27, 2018 at 5:37:46 PM UTC-5, jfitch wrote:
My motivation is to prevent having to fly blatantly unsafely in order to feel competitive.


Your ignorance is showing.

T8
 




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