At 02:25 17 March 2013, Jeremy Keeling wrote:
At 00:54 17 March 2013, Ralph Jones wrote:
On Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:14:55 -0700, Eric Greenwell
wrote:

On 3/16/2013 1:03 PM, Jeremy Keeling wrote:
A stationary aircraft with no pilot inside took off because of
nothing
but
a stiff breeze...lessons to be learned...

http://video.uk.msn.com/watch/video/...keoff/886gu2cd

One lesson might be "don't park it with full up elevator". It's strange

to me a camera would be focused on such a small area, unless it was an
intentional event.

Intentional indeed. I'd say it's a model.


Actually this business about parking with full elevator is a good one.
Some clubs I know are very good, in my opinion, in that they do up the
pilots harness around the joystick after landing in order to hold it in a
back position (full up elevator) so that as the glider is being towed
back
to the launch point the control surfaces don't 'clunk around' etc. I
think
this is a good idea, but typically what happened as the aircraft got back
to the launch point is that they would be lined up for launch, into wind
ofcourse, with full elevator still on. It seems to me to be a good point
about not leaving aircraft parked with full elevator, particularly into
wind.
Definetly a lesson to be learned there...

I don't think the aircraft is a model haha, look at the relative size of
everything around it.
It seems to me that the CCTV camera would be looking towards an aircraft
parking area maybe? Or perhaps the other aircraft that were there had
already been tossed over and the person fetched his camera to catch the
last one...I dunno.

Up elevator only matters on a nose-wheel aircraft. Most empty gliders sit
with the tail-wheel or skid on the ground so elevator position is almost
irrelevant.