Gear Warning

In article ,
John Galloway wrote:

At 00:06 25 November 2005, Mark Newton wrote:
What would this thread have looked like if the BGA
had released a position paper which said that collision
warning devices were discouraged because pilots should be looking
out, and if they're not looking out the last thing
we want to do is surprise them and distract them in the
high-stress environment they get when another glider is in the
final moments of a collision course?

People die in collisions.
Nobody ever died simply by landing a glider wheel-up
on a runway but many have from approach control failures.

I repeat what I said in my original message on this subject:
If you are flying so unsafely that the first moment at which
you open the airbrakes (and subsquently hear the gear alert)
is in the final few feet of your approach when you're vulnerable
to a heavy landing caused by control fumbling, then you're an
accident waiting to happen anyway.

Gear warnings happen at the *TOP* of final approach, when the
airbrakes are opened after an overshoot has been identified;
Or, in some countries, during base leg when the brakes are
unlocked. I challenge you to highlight even *ONE* way that
a fumble of the controls at that stage of the flight could
lead to injuries from a mishandled landing.

No amount of technological trickery, checklists, or control
finesse will save you if you're not opening the brakes until
10 feet off the deck. That means you're participating in a
ridiculously low-energy approach, with an extremely poorly-planned
circuit (or no circuit at all), and if you do that often enough
for the gear warning to represent a significant risk then
I contend that *you will kill yourself*, gear warning or no
gear warning.

As Graeme Cant says, the gear warning is a red herring. People
who injure themselves by putting the wheel down at the last minute
when the buzzer sounds have deeper, more serious training problems
than anything we've discussed in this thread.

- mark