Are off-airport landouts common and/or dangerous?

Yes definitely educate yourself on perils of underinsuring. Short version is that the insurance company may total it and take the glider for something that should really repaired.

Brian

If you're not willing to fly cross country, you really shouldn't buy a
glider.Â* Renting a club or commercial glider will cost far less in the
long run because, if you just hang out around the airport, you'll
quickly become bored and leave the sport.

On 5/26/2019 7:34 PM, wrote:
"If my glider is totaled by my insurance company, I doubt that I could afford to get another one like it, since I got a very good glider at a great price."


Ben, already a lot of good answers below. Two points, one is raise the hull value of your glider so it would be replaceable. It is YOUR DECLARED VALUE, not what you bought it for. An increase in hull value will probably not cost you as much as you think, and damage to your glider where the hull value is too low will certainly cost you more than you want.

On landing out, Wind, Wires, Slope, Surface. Slope almost always trumps wind. If you can see it from the air, land up slope.

Kevin Anderson
92

--
Dan, 5J

Air Sailing has a Cross-Country camp each Spring, with lectures and field trips addressing this risk. Well worth flying it. You can potentially secure a ship for the week by joining the Nevada Soaring Association, or get a rental from Minden (more expensive).

If you fly conservatively, you will always have some place you'd be happy to land on in range. For me this included the Miccosukee HQ parking lot for the 1-26 - didn't need it, flew past LaBelle. I have taken many roadtrips to look for good fields and stretches of wide, quiet roads without powerlines. Some of my landouts have been in fields that were nicer than airports.

Landing out will not win the day, so the quote you bring up needs massaging..

Roads are to be avoided unless you have specifically surveyed some particular stretch in advance. Besides cars, problems are signs and posts and wires and berms and parallel wire fencing that can easily become deadly if you ground loop into it.

I know two glider pilots who spotted a hangar, windsock and adjacent runway. On short final the runway looked a little short necessitating good speed control and spot landing skills.

They landed on RC strips.

On Monday, May 27, 2019 at 9:30:00 AM UTC-7, Steve Koerner wrote:
Roads are to be avoided unless you have specifically surveyed some particular stretch in advance. Besides cars, problems are signs and posts and wires and berms and parallel wire fencing that can easily become deadly if you ground loop into it.

Yes - roads are the worst place to land...unless the alternatives are worse still. Careful scouting can help but won't solve every problem. For instance, there are a couple of places around Nephi, UT where there are pretty long gaps between airports and no cultivation so you are left with trackless desert (often filled with ravines and boulders - I'm told this is where they filmed "The Martian") or roads. Scouting some spots with enough width that markers and high shoulders aren't a problem still leaves you with the chance of traffic if you get flushed in the wrong spot, but it beats landing in a ravine. Many of these roads are lightly travelled - but others aren't - and you can always run into bad timing I suppose.

I would never head out over such terrain without a glide to an airport, but strong conditions can generate strong sink and you can end up running out of altitude and ideas at the same time in pretty short order.

Emergency landing spots are best not planned in the cockpit if you can help it and best not used if you can avoid it, but I get some comfort out of having at least some hip-pocket spots picked out just in case.

Know terrain where you are headed before you head there.

Andy Blackburn
9B

On Monday, May 27, 2019 at 10:03:14 AM UTC-6, wrote:
snip
Landing out will not win the day, so the quote you bring up needs massaging.

Not always. My story could either make your point or dispute it.

My 1st contest day win was when I followed the contest leader over an airport in still (overcast) air on course. He was trying to get every point he could to stay in the lead. I was not in the running for a contest win, so at the appropriate point I turned around and landed at at the airport. The two leaders continued on and landed in fields, the contest was close enough that the one that did a couple extra miles won the contest. However this was the 1st year that the 25 point airport bonus was implemented and I ended up winning the day by landing at an airport. I landed there just because it was safer and more convenient, I was not aware of the airport bonus, or at least wasn't considering it when I landed there.

Brian

This TOTALLY depends on where you fly. In MN south of the Twin Cities, at this time of year there are lots of freshly plowed fields and landing out is no problem at all if you pick a good field. Later in the summer when the corn gets tall, it's a little dicier.

In South Florida landing out is dangerous. You either have orange groves, plowed fields with very deep ditches, everglades that may look pretty benign from the air, but have waves of grass hiding serious coral heads, and absolutely no way to get access to retrieve the glider, or pasture land that has significant obstacles that are hard to see from the air, but which are the reason they are not plowed fields or orchards.

On Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 2:00:05 PM UTC-7, Charles Ethridge wrote:
Hi all.

First off, I was a fairly experienced CFI and Chief Flight Instructor with a great record, and am now a Commercial Glider Pilot, so I'm not a total newbie in the glider world.

I realize that my initial question may be obvious to some, but here in South Florida, we NEVER land out in fields (unless there is an emergency, of course). We only land out at one other airport, and even that is quite rare.

The question has two parts:

1. Are off-airport landouts common?

I've now heard/read two different philosophies on this. One is from Garret Willat's articles, in which he essentially says that if you are not landing out fairly often, you are not flying aggressively enough in your contests. Is he meaning landing out in unknown fields? or just at known-to-be-safe fields and airports?

The opposite philosophy I THOUGHT I heard in David Lessnick's great webinar last week was that one should ALWAYS be landing out at airports and never on roads or unknown fields....or at least have a KNOWN-TO-BE-SAFE field or airport within your glide range.

2. When landing out, are your gliders often damaged, even just a little bit?

The reason I ask is that I've been flying my glider fairly regularly for the past few years. I fly quite conservatively (compared to what I read in Soaring magazine anyway) and have NEVER damaged it, not even slightly. I am retired and not rich, and so when I think about how much it would cost to get even slight damage fixed, I hesitate to even contemplate doing cross-country flights, due to the risk of damage during landout, but more so due to the risk of my insurance company upping my premiums or canceling my policy altogether. If my glider is totaled by my insurance company, I doubt that I could afford to get another one like it, since I got a very good glider at a great price.

Tom Knauff, in his book After Solo, recommends specific and thorough landout training for the reason he states (p 122):

"During the 1987 Sports Class Nationals, more than 30% of the pilots entered in the contest, damaged their ships during off field landings!"

But as far as I know (Soaring magazine ads, webinars, this forum), no one is teaching such a course. So without confidence in landing out without ANY damage, is cross-country flying thus a rich man's sport?

In New Zealand landouts are very common. I'd say something like one a week at my club, on average, and a lot more during a contest.

In the summer when most of the cross country flying is done it's pretty safe. Fields from which a crop of hay has been taken within the last month or so are common, extremely easy to spot from the air, and unlikely to have any nasty surprises.

While simply looking for something when you need it usually works out, it's a good idea to scout out some known-good fields in advance. If you have somewhere you know is ok every 20 or 30 km then it's hard to get caught short.. Other local pilots will already have their own list, and many clubs publish consolidated lists, complete with GPS coordinates, notes, and maybe even photos. Driving around and looking at them from ground level (or grabbing a Cessna or motor glider and making some low approaches) before you start flying cross country in a new area is not a stupid idea.

Where a field is big enough to aero-tow out of and the landowner is cooperative, my club from time to time takes early solo and near solo pilots and a couple of gliders there for a day away from the landmarks of the home field.

You can see a couple of practice approaches into one such field (an aerial topdresing strip, as is common in NZ) in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJapUCeDeOI

On Sunday, May 26, 2019 at 8:38:10 PM UTC-7, Bruce Hoult wrote:

While simply looking for something when you need it usually works out, it's a good idea to scout out some known-good fields in advance. If you have somewhere you know is ok every 20 or 30 km then it's hard to get caught short. Other local pilots will already have their own list, and many clubs publish consolidated lists, complete with GPS coordinates, notes, and maybe even photos. Driving around and looking at them from ground level (or grabbing a Cessna or motor glider and making some low approaches) before you start flying cross country in a new area is not a stupid idea.


+1 on scouting fields ahead of time. Know what the crops are and what they look like from the air. I failed to do this at one contest and it cost me a broken tail boom - my only serious outlanding damage in 40 years of racing..

At a western US contest site I fly frequently the task area is huge and there are lots of dodgy spots. I've scouted and marked in my waypoint database 45-50 fields, dry lakes, and roads (without highway markers). Some based on Google maps and street view, but many of the more important ones by driving up to several hourt out of the way to scout on foot. I also try to scout as many fields in the database as I can from the air when flying, regardless of whether I'm in imminent danger of landing.

It comes in handy. I remember one contest day in particular where I glided through pretty dead air for 70 miles before catching a 7-knot thermal 500' above a a little ridge. The last 20-25 miles of the glide was unlandable terrain. I had marked in the database the first group of cultivated fields in a valley 1500' or so below the ridge that generated the thermal. I never would've gone for it without that knowledge and the field programmed into the glide computer.

Fields can have surprises so it's important to know the local environment, particularly in terms of cultivation, but also in terms of meadows and roadways. Some places the options are pretty good and some places are no-go.

Definitely don't land with the gators. ;-)

Andy Blackburn
9B