On Jan 3, 2:34 pm, Michael Ash wrote:
In rec.aviation.student Jim Stewart wrote:



Morgans wrote:
"Michael Ash" wrote

I recall an unfortunate incident in which a poorly-placed water bag had
somewhat reduced my right aileron authority, and I thought I could get
it
out of the way in the middle of the takeoff. The aircraft quickly
disabused me of this notion, and I recovered without breaking anything,
but it made for an embarrassing show. (Why is it that you can be
absolutely certain that someone is watching when you screw it up, and
absolutely certain that nobody was around to see it when you make a
greaser landing?

I'm not up on glider operations, so maybe you can clue me in.

What is a water bag? Ballasting? Why would it have been laid on the
ailerons? How or why could it be forgotten? How big is it?

Thanks for taking the time to fill in a "motor head!" g

Inside the cabin between his leg and the stick?

Sorry for being unclear. You're very close, it was actually between my leg
and the outer wall of the cabin.

The precise geometry of the situation actually helped cause my error. I
was flying a 1-26, an older, American-built metal glider with something of
an un-ergonomic cockpit. I'm a pretty big guy and I'm really crammed in
the my legs nearly brush the instrument panel and my head is just an
inch or so from the canopy. Most importantly for this particular scenario,
my knees are right at stick-top height, and the full range of the stick is
large enough to bump my knees.

What happened was that over the course of my previous flying, I got used
to hitting my knees during the control check. Then on the day in question,
I bumped my right knee much sooner than I should have, but didn't notice
the difference. I had gotten into the bad habit of interpreting "knee hit"
as "full range of motion". Of course I noticed during the takeoff roll
when I was having trouble holding the left wing up, but I should have
either aborted the takeoff or lived with the problem until I could get to
a reasonable altitude.

I'm not sure what the lesson is in this one. Obviously dealing properly
with distractions is a big one: don't let a small problem divert your
attention and cause a big problem. I'm not sure how to prevent the error
which led to the original problem, though. Obviously I'll never make that
*particular* error again, but how can you help ensure that you don't start
using the wrong signal as confirmation of a checklist item, besides just
trying to pay more attention?

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software

One of my favorite stupid things I did was rotate for
take-off and scared a gazillion birds out of the trees.
This runway had a groove cut into the trees, to get
out of.
Well, I'm looking at the *pretty* birds and instructor
suggests, "maybe we should fly underneath the
flock", before I thought of that.
But yeah, I shifted pitch down and went under the
flucking flock. Dang birds and spinning props is
an unhealthly combo for both parties.
Ken