On Nov 3, 11:00*am, Steve Leonard wrote:
....
I can see in my mind exactly how this could have played out. *He ended
up at an altitude that would permit a safe return to landing the
opposite direction, but without the airspeed required to do it.
Please think about this for your training and day to day flying. *The
turn around to land the other direction depends not just on potential
energy, but total energy. *I think the plan was to be at the end of
the runway, at a bit under 200 feet, but full normal pattern speed.
This is the part that fell short of the plan. *With results we have
all read about.

As usual, this thread has 2 topics: What Happened? and Things This
Reminds Me Of.
I continue to think, on the What Happened topic, that something
unanticipated went wrong, either with the glider or the pilot, as
there's no explanation for the "pitched up sharply" phenomenon. No
experienced pilot would deliberately do this. Was there a release
failure followed by an attempt to break the weak link? An elevator-
linkage failure? A seizure or cardiac arrest or sudden vertigo? Other?
Likely unanswerable, except for the elevator-linkage question.

DanlJ