Video of off-field landing from cockpit

On Oct 18, 7:08*pm, mattm wrote:
On Oct 18, 2:03*pm, mattm wrote:





On Oct 18, 1:03*pm, Bruno wrote:

Hey everyone. We had a fun weekend up in Utah with many gliders up in
the air enjoying the amazing fall colors and mountain scenery. *At the
end of Friday's flight I decided to extend the flight and go play out
in the weak wave lift in the valley northeast of the Logan airport. It
was fun until it stopped being fun...

For those of you who have not yet enjoyed an off-field landing, this
video shows the final 6 minutes before the landout and then landing in
the farmer's alfalfa field. It does a good job of showing the desire
to try to stretch and make it home but in the end making the correct
decision and landing safely short of the airport in a good field.
Please note the field was chosen and looked over well before the gear
came down.

Other than a few green leaves that needed to be washed away from the
bottom of the glider it was no worse for wear and I am thrilled to
have the video to share with others of what the experience of landing
in a field is like.

Please watch the video in the highest resolution your computer and
connection can handle. *It was shot in 1080HD and at that resolution
you should be able to read all the numbers on the instruments. *The
camera is a Canon HF20 with a fish eye lens which does a great job of
distorting my face... *It is mounted on 1" ball RAM mount
adjustable arms. *I have a custom voltage reducer to take a full 12
volt 7 amp/hr battery and lower it to 8.4 volts so I get 7+ hours of
battery life. The standard camera batteries only last a few hours max
so this is necessary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBfNA5nhGQM&hd=1

Here is the igc file - it wasn't an impressive flight but you can see
the trace at the end where the video shows the final moments.http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0....html?flightId...

Thanks for watching and hope you enjoy.

Bruno Vassel IV - B4http://www.youtube.com/user/bviv

Excellent video. *Wish I had this available last month when I was
giving a land out
talk. *There's a few things that you should learn from the experience,
though
(shouldn't there always be?), as suggested by the likes of Tim Welles
and
Kai Gertsen:

1. turn off the radio when you're low -- it's just a distraction.
Also,
as Doug Jacobs likes to say, if you can do anything else while
thermalling,
you're not thinking about thermalling hard enough. *You can turn it
back
on after you land and tell everyone you're all right.
2. pick the field while you still have room to change your mind, and
when
you can see it properly. *You picked a field ahead of yourself a ways,
and lucked
out that it was a good field (it was into the sun, too, so it had to
be hard to
see it well). *I tried that last year and landed in chest-high barley
(ouch).
3. pick the field at a more reasonable altitude. *300 feet (100m for
the rest
of the world) is more like the altitude you should be turning base to
final.
It's a little hard to see, but it seems you had good fields under you
at 800 feet,
and you had a good chance to look at them while you were scratching
(which is a good exception to DJ's rule).

There's a bunch of good presentations on off field landings (and lots
of
other great soaring stuff) at Doug Jacob's collection of stuff for
the
US Team camps:http://www.dragonnorth.com/djpresentations/index.html

-- Matt

Also, I don't want to sound negative in all this. *You did do stuff
right, too --
checklist, take the safe option to go into the field (rather than
stretching
too far), and local field knowledge. *As you said on the radio, you
were very
close to glide slope, but you broke off while you still had time to
maneuver.
There's too many NTSB reports of pilots just hoping for that last 80
feet to
materialize...

-- Matt- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

If the pilot hadn't rejected some weak lift (by US standards) and then
glid in a straight line rather than faffing around, he might have made
it back!

Derek C

- Show quoted text -

If the pilot hadn't rejected some weak lift (by US standards) and then
glid in a straight line rather than faffing around, he might have made
it back!

Derek C

Let's see if I can put the same observation a bit more politely. In
part, as this sort of video makes a great training tool for aspiring
cross country pilots. Lessons learned? One big one, of course, is that
stretching final glides for the last 2-3 miles at very low altitudes
is a coffin corner, and this pilot made the right decision not to try
it. The wisdom of "glid in a straight line" depends very much on
terrain and altitude. Mc 0 + 10 feet and unlandable terrain makes it a
bad idea.

But, as Derek points out, the beginning part of the video shows a lot
of waffling around in 10 - 20 degree bank, with the vario showing all
sorts of lift possibilities, while the pilot chats on the radio. I see
those surges on the vario and push the mouse hard to one side. Now,
perhaps "turn the radio off" is extreme. It is potentially a good idea
to notify others of your predicament and imminent chance of landing
out. But then "I'm too busy to talk" might be a better idea, and focus
really hard on catching those scraps of lift, with accurate aggressive
thermaling and decent bank angles -- while of course also looking hard
at the fields below. There is a maxim, "don't leave any lift below X
feet," which applies too, and the pilot said as much at the end of the
flight. I have also suffered bouts of impatience in scratch
thermaling, and spent many pleasant hours in farmer's fields bemoaning
it afterwards.

John Cochrane

On Oct 19, 1:36*pm, John Cochrane
wrote:
- Show quoted text -

If the pilot hadn't rejected some weak lift (by US standards) and then
glid in a straight line rather than faffing around, he might have made
it back!

Derek C

Let's see if I can put the same observation a bit more politely. In
part, as this sort of video makes a great training tool for aspiring
cross country pilots. Lessons learned? One big one, of course, is that
stretching final glides for the last 2-3 miles at very low altitudes
is a coffin corner, and this pilot made the right decision not to try
it. The wisdom of "glid in a straight line" depends very much on
terrain and altitude. Mc 0 + 10 feet and unlandable terrain makes it a
bad idea.

But, as Derek points out, the beginning part of the video shows a lot
of waffling around in 10 - 20 degree bank, with the vario showing all
sorts of lift possibilities, while the pilot chats on the radio. I see
those surges on the vario and push the mouse hard to one side. Now,
perhaps "turn the radio off" is extreme. It is potentially a good idea
to notify others of your predicament and imminent chance of landing
out. But then "I'm too busy to talk" might be a better idea, and focus
really hard on catching those scraps of lift, with accurate aggressive
thermaling and decent bank angles -- while of course also looking hard
at the fields below. There is a maxim, "don't leave any lift below X
feet," which applies too, and the pilot said as much at the end of the
flight. I have also suffered bouts of impatience in scratch
thermaling, and spent many pleasant hours in farmer's fields bemoaning
it afterwards.

John Cochrane

Judging by the angle of the sun, it' was quite late in the day and the
thernals would be getting weak. The pilot was probably tired and
hadn't quite changed gear into scratching mode. Add to that he is
trying to thermal, talk on the radio, calculate his final glide, and
pick fields, all at the same time. He never once completes a turn in
the lift he does encounter, so we can't tell whether a climb was
possible or not. I must admit that I have sometimes made the same
errors at the end of a flight, due to a combination of tiredness and
overload.

Yesterday I retrieved a friend who got a bit carried away by mid
October thermals in the UK and got into the same situation as Bruno.
He landed in about the biggest field I have ever seen about 4 miles
out, rather than risk a very marginal glide back to site.

Derek C