When gliders fail in flight, but pilots manage to land

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".