Glider Crash Argentina

Thanks, Erik and John, for talking openly about stress related piloting skill degradation. It's a very valuable discussion because it isn't brought up much, and thus most pilots don't know to guard against it. Here's a couple of things that happened to me because of things I didn't know.

One was during a downwind off-field landing, which was going well until on very short final I saw a single wire electric fence across my flight path. I overflew the fence, but then needed to do a ground loop to stop before hitting some rapidly approaching trees. Problem was, I hadn't ever been told how to ground loop properly. I did unload the tail to avoid over stressing it, but I didn't raise the low wing aileron, and the 6 inch long grass destroyed it. What I needed to know was that if you ever have to do an intentional ground loop, you must move the stick like you're doing a diving turn.

The second occurred while trying to land at a small grass farmers airstrip. I'd never seen it in person, but it was in my turn point file because it had showed up on Google Earth. The problem was, it had been abandoned since the last time the GE photo had been taken. What I learned from that was it's a good idea at the beginning of the season to take a drive to verify small airstrips are still in existence.

-John, Q3