W.J. (Bill) Dean (U.K.). wrote:
There are two points about what is thought to have happened to Peter Masak
and to others.

1./ Don't get caught out crossing a ridge (or by any of the many other
mistakes open to us).

2./ If you do get caught out and a crash of some sort becomes unavoidable,
DON'T STALL/SPIN.

W.J. (Bill) Dean (U.K.).
Remove "ic" to reply.

You need to read the NTSB report for more background, the Wikipedia
article is an abridged version. He was not crossing the ridge line
directly, but was working a higher ridge line into the corner of a fold
toward the lower ridge. The Wikipedia article has the coordinates, and
they hotlink to a list of maps, so you can see the topographic and
satellite views of the area.

Anyway, he was not caught out where a crash was inevitable. There were
good fields behind him near Alexandria, and he was high enough to reach
them easily, and had enough room to turn around safely. But something
happened to cause him to *inadvertently* stall/spin, with insufficient
altitude for recovery.

He was flying his very experimental glider with a Ventus B fuselage,
Ventus 2 wings, and probably the tailplane of his own design. Since he
was in competition, he probably set the C.G. far back near the aft
limit, but with the experimental configuration, there was no factory
defined limit, so who knows where it actually was. Only he knew what
the stall characteristic of this configuration were.

Tom Knauff retraced his flight track from the logger file in a touring
motorglider, and commented that he probably would have done the same
thing in the same situation, so although he was being aggressive, he
was not being stupid. Had he made it, he would have probably won the
day by a large margin, because he would have reached a distant W facing
ridge nobody else did, which would have worked in the SW winds that day.