Trailer Chains - To Cross of Not to Cross - That is the Question

At 08:48 03 May 2014, Z Goudie wrote:
At 04:14 03 May 2014, BobW wrote:

That said, once when retrieving someone - their vehicle pulling a
factory

PIK-20 trailer - less than two miles from the airport & still in town,
someone
pulled up beside me waving frantically and pointing behind me. I pulled
over
to figure out why. When I pre-flighted the (ready to go [almost!])
trailer,
I
missed catching the fact the rear door wasn't latched. It'd flopped open
and
was skating raucously on the metal brackets that support the door when
the

fuselage rests on it for rigging.

Car and trailer pulled away from traffic lights only to have someone come
up alongside gesticulating wildly.
The trailer door was open and the Dart fuselage was lying on it's side
back
at the lights....

Brennig James on the North Circular (London) in the late 1960's.

I sort of witnessed a similar event on my first ever arrival at Nypsfield
in 1974. I was driving up the hill from Stroud, with my K6e trailer on the
back, when, near the top of the hill, I saw a Kestrel fusilage leaning
against the grass bank by the side of the road. Comp number 29, my friend
John Glossop. I assumed he had arrived a day early for the competition and
landed out on a practice flight. A couple of minutes later I drove in the
airfield gate and saw a trailer in front of me, doors open, no fusilage
inside and John Glossop and a Nypsfield club member (who had noticed the
problem when John stopped to ask directions for parking) walking towards
the back of the trailer. John had apparently thought that the other guy
was pulling his leg, when he gopt to the back of the trailer and found it
open and no fusilage, the expression on his face was one I remeber to this
day. The only damage was a nbroken rudder and Slingsbys got a new one to
him next morning, he was only a bit late launching on the task.