On Monday, May 26, 2014 6:44:41 PM UTC+12, Chris Rollings wrote:
Some years ago I witnessed a fatal spin-in following a launch failure. It
was a winch launch, the cable broke at about 150 feet agl. There was
plenty of room to land ahead on the airfield but the glider started a turn

Well, that's clearly stupid.

The place I normally fly is short (but long enough we have 150 ft or so over the fence on a normal day, less if dead calm, more if a decent headwind) and the options are houses houses and houses, or turn back.

If you've got "cross the boundary fence and take the next paddock" that's a different matter.

And if you've got a km of runway still in front of you then turning back from 150 ft is utterly stupid. I don't think anyone here is arguing for that.

In the UK it is almost universal practice to set QFE not QNH on glider
altimeters (most gliding sites are less than 1,000 feet amsl), I noticed

Um. Who the heck looks at the *altimeter* at a time like that? Look out the window!


A couple of years ago the field I usually fly from got a flight information service. They can't tell us what to do, in every regard except one. When we arrived back and joined the circuit they'd (along with wind etc) tell us the QNH and EXPECT US TO REPEAT IT BACK. And presumably expect us to set the altimeter to it.

It's been a long process, but we seem to have finally convinced them that by the time we've made the decision to land and made the downwind call we are no longer interested in the altimeter, what it says, or what the QNH is. That was useful 20 or 30 km out, but from this point on we're ignoring the altimeter and looking out the window.