When gliders fail in flight, but pilots manage to land

Not picking......just commenting.

While I hate to think of a control failure in flight, a thread like this may prompt others to try "stupid stuff" at altitude.
I don't know who said it first (maybe one of the Wrights?), don't stop flying until all motion has ended!
Basically, even if a wrong input, keep trying something until things stop. Keep trying "pilot ****" until things stop moving.
A semi controlled crash is way better than an uncontrolled crash.

Only comment is a pilot (decades ago in NJ) that landed a SEL powered plane (on a golf fairway) and drove it between 2 trees. His comment, "I heard shedding the wings was a good thing in a crash".
They could have refueled, taken off, gone to the local airport.
Whatever.

Yes, this is a good thread, may make peeps think a bit.
May.

My only in-flight glider failure happened back when I was a 'baby level pilot'. Fortunately, it was a baby level glider failure, but at the time, I thought I needed a yaw string to fly coordinated with confidence. During aerotow, my yaw string departed the canopy. 'Oh s***!'

I heard my instructor's voice echo, 'stay on tow, altitude is your friend, give yourself some time to work things out, stay calm.' I softly vocalized 'stay calm'.

I knew about 'spin on turn to base', but I had also practiced 'slip on turn to base'. Slip good, skid bad.

I added 5 knots to my pattern speed, and kept the rudder neutral.

Many years ago, a friend of mine had the linkage to both ailerons in his 1-26 come disconnected in flight. The pins in the linkage fell out inside the fuselage, and we never did find the safety pin to see what happened to it.

Anyway, the 1-26 has quite a bit of wing dihedral, and he managed to bring it back to the field and land it, using rudder for slow gradual turns. The glider is still flying today.

Jim Beckman in NJ

Two years ago, on my first flight of the year I saw that the airspeed indicator was not working (read zero). Feeling comfortable with approximate airspeeds I did a refresh on where close to stall was and went off on a 2 1/2 hour cross country flight with no problems. Kept the speed up and nose down a bit on pattern and landing. Looking into the nose area I found that the plastic tubing had slipped off the Pitot tube in the nose, probably from a long trailer ride. It is now secured with a Ty-wrap.

Decades ago, I did a "first flight of the season" in a ASW-20. Normal preflight of, "cup hand around tail probe and blow" yielded sorta normal needle movement.
At about 200', airspeed was low (glider felt solid), so continued flight.
Flew for a couple hours, landed fine, derigged.
Found a rodent had chewed through a pressure tube. A quick blow looked fine, steady state had a leak.
I had reverted to, "does it look good, does it feel good, does it sound good?".
Decent short cross country, woulda sucked for a competition.

So, unless IFR, revert to basics, hopefully you were taught the basics...... IFR stresses, "believe the instruments, verify what is correct".