On 4/4/2016 3:22 PM, John Godfrey (QT) wrote:
Snip...

One key element in this is the recognition that if you have a "departure"
FOR ANY REASON (inattention, turbulence, surprise etc.) below a certain
altitude YOU WILL hit the ground. It is important to be in-flight aware of
when you have descended into the "I will be hurt" zone.

Absolutely - what John says!!! Apparent lack of said "hurt/death zone
awareness" seems (to me) to be a fairly consistently missing element in "the
vast majority of" this millennium's U.S. glider fatalities in the NTSB's database.

Moreover, it's usually easily found/seen at any glider site on any flying
weekend, in my observational/participational experience. One of the funnier
(to me, and, because no glider pilots were harmed in the making and gaining of
the experience) occurred on a non-soarable, flat calm, clear, winter-season,
day at one of our Club's winch camps. Our nose-hooked 2-33 with two
experienced (both had made more than one successful OFL), "potential PICs" on
board, got a lowish snap (600'agl?) and - to my surprise - instead of doing
whatever the PIC thought reasonable to do under the circumstances, but doing
it from a position allowing them "no-brainer pattern entry considerations"
proceeded to do it from more or less directly along the center line of the
runway, down to "considerably lower than would've been prudent at our busy
home field." And *then* instead of performing a distance-minimizing teardrop
turn onto final, the "home field's, textbook mandated, 4-leg pattern was
(safely, if tree-scrapingly low base-to-final turn) performed...to the more
distant end of the runway (presumably for "next snap" convenience reasons).

Because I knew both pilots, I wasn't terribly worried about them actually
killing themselves or horribly bending the sailplane, but as I watched the
(inexplicable, to me) meanderings going on more or less overhead, I got the
image of a drunken sailor stumbling about, utterly planless. The three of us
hee-hawed about it afterwards, though I seemed to find the drunken sailor
analogy funnier than did the actual PIC. (Happily, the *actual* PIC admitted
to some embarrassment for the lack of obvious/decisive flight planning, but I
later had to apologize to him for using - in a suitably anonymous fashion -
the incident as "safety filler" in our Club's newsletter, which I put together
for years because it was fun for me to do. Using "anonymized" on-field
sillinesses was a routine part of its content, but occasionally a "rightfully"
embarrassed pilot took offense. Curiously, I can't recall ever having occasion
for them to appear in future issues, while - sad to say - that wasn't
universally true of *every* PPG-carrying Club member.)

Whether on not the
risk is worth it to you is between you and your family.


Indeed, although the anal part of me feels compelled to add that government
minions always maintain an interested watch on the statistical front, so to
that potential extent, effects also theoretically extend to the rest of the
piloting community at large.

Bob W.