Sorry Mark, but Stefan is right.
Outlanding (in a field, not an airstrip) in soaring is not really planned,
but as it is part of the game it needs to be anticipated. The terrain below
you doesn't change that, it changes just the tactics of your
flight/decisions.
If you haven't been trained for it, you are not trained for x-country.
Outlandings happen because of poor judgement of yourself or of the frog
sitting at the meteo office - if they don't happen over a long time, you're
just not trying to get the max distance out of the day (which can be a
personal choice, nothing wrong with that). Remember - good judgement comes
from experience, and experience comes from poor judgements :-)
"Out"landing on an airfield is just another landing.

--
Bert Willing

ASW20 "TW"


"Mark James Boyd" a écrit dans le message de
news:403c579e$1@darkstar...
In article ,
Stefan wrote:
Mark James Boyd wrote:

I think of unplanned outlandings in the same way I think of
running out of gas in a power plane.

When soaring, unplanned outlandings are part of the game. Running out of
gas definitely is not.

I don't accept unplanned outlandings as inevitable. Carl Herold has
avoided them for a long time, by using good judgement
and doing his homework. If I had an unplanned outlanding,
I would really chalk it up to my own poor judgement, just as I would
think of running out of gas...


For different glider pilots, I think different types of
"outlandings" may be an emergency or may be an "abnormal" procedure.

For glider pilots, an outlanding is neither an emergency nor an abnormal
procedure. It is a perfectly normal procedure that you have been trained
for. If it's not, you've got a lousy training and are not ready for
cross country, period.

I haven't trained this. I never executed an unplanned outlanding
flying dual. And I'm not planning on it either...

But perhaps this is just semantics. The definition of
an "unplanned outlanding" seems quite different in the
hostile forests of Truckee, vs. the flat farmland of the Calif.
Central Valley...