Wikipedia:Peter Masak

The Wikipedia article on Peter Masak is scheduled to be featured in
tomorrow's update of the "Did you know" section of the Wikipedia main
page as follows:

Did you know...that American inventor Peter Masak developed glider
winglets for gliding competitions that helped him win a U.S. national
championship, and became standard equipment on new high-performance
sailplanes in less than 10 years?

You can read (and update) the article he

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Masak

Doug Haluza wrote:
The Wikipedia article on Peter Masak is scheduled to be featured in
tomorrow's update of the "Did you know" section of the Wikipedia main
page as follows:
You can read (and update) the article he
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Masak

Thanks for the link. A very interesting article. The following
paragraph caught my attention:

He flew a later version of this glider, with factory built Ventus 2
wings, in the 2004 U.S. 15 Meter Nationals gliding competition being
held at Mifflin County Airport, the same contest he won 11 years
earlier. While flying a competition task, he crashed in a syncline fold
in the Tussey Mountain ridge, a few miles south of the village of
Alexandria, Pennsylvania at 40°29.94'N 78°08.49'W. He was
attempting to cross the ridge line upwind, and encountered sinking air
and turbulence in the lee of the mountain crest, resulting in an
inadvertent stall/spin.[7] The crash was not survivable, and he was
killed on impact. [8]

Having recently lost a friend in a similar accident, it emphasizes that
crossing a ridge, especially against the wind, can be a very dangerous
maneuver. You might do it many times without incident, but if you allow
yourself to get at all close to the ground, there's the danger that
some time the various factors will converge to get you just a bit
closer. There's a probability distribution on how low you'll go, and
you don't want to test the tail of the distribution.

The conclusion is obvious, but also obviously overlooked too often:
Large ground clearances are good; small ones are more dangerous than we
think.

I'd say the same applies to ridge soaring, but I know many will
disagree with me, so I won't.

Martin

There are two points about what is thought to have happened to Peter Masak
and to others.

1./ Don't get caught out crossing a ridge (or by any of the many other
mistakes open to us).

2./ If you do get caught out and a crash of some sort becomes unavoidable,
DON'T STALL/SPIN.

W.J. (Bill) Dean (U.K.).
Remove "ic" to reply.

wrote in message
ups.com...

Doug Haluza wrote:

The Wikipedia article on Peter Masak is scheduled to be featured in
tomorrow's update of the "Did you know" section of the Wikipedia main
page as follows:
You can read (and update) the article he
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Masak


Thanks for the link. A very interesting article. The following
paragraph caught my attention:

He flew a later version of this glider, with factory built Ventus 2
wings, in the 2004 U.S. 15 Meter Nationals gliding competition being
held at Mifflin County Airport, the same contest he won 11 years
earlier. While flying a competition task, he crashed in a syncline fold
in the Tussey Mountain ridge, a few miles south of the village of
Alexandria, Pennsylvania at 40°29.94'N 78°08.49'W. He was
attempting to cross the ridge line upwind, and encountered sinking air
and turbulence in the lee of the mountain crest, resulting in an
inadvertent stall/spin.[7] The crash was not survivable, and he was
killed on impact. [8]

Having recently lost a friend in a similar accident, it emphasizes that
crossing a ridge, especially against the wind, can be a very dangerous
maneuver. You might do it many times without incident, but if you allow
yourself to get at all close to the ground, there's the danger that
some time the various factors will converge to get you just a bit
closer. There's a probability distribution on how low you'll go, and
you don't want to test the tail of the distribution.

The conclusion is obvious, but also obviously overlooked too often:
Large ground clearances are good; small ones are more dangerous than we
think.

I'd say the same applies to ridge soaring, but I know many will
disagree with me, so I won't.

Martin.

That's great. Peter was great! --JHC

Doug Haluza wrote:
The Wikipedia article on Peter Masak is scheduled to be featured in
tomorrow's update of the "Did you know" section of the Wikipedia main
page as follows:

W.J. (Bill) Dean (U.K.). wrote:
There are two points about what is thought to have happened to Peter Masak
and to others.

1./ Don't get caught out crossing a ridge (or by any of the many other
mistakes open to us).

2./ If you do get caught out and a crash of some sort becomes unavoidable,
DON'T STALL/SPIN.

W.J. (Bill) Dean (U.K.).
Remove "ic" to reply.

You need to read the NTSB report for more background, the Wikipedia
article is an abridged version. He was not crossing the ridge line
directly, but was working a higher ridge line into the corner of a fold
toward the lower ridge. The Wikipedia article has the coordinates, and
they hotlink to a list of maps, so you can see the topographic and
satellite views of the area.

Anyway, he was not caught out where a crash was inevitable. There were
good fields behind him near Alexandria, and he was high enough to reach
them easily, and had enough room to turn around safely. But something
happened to cause him to *inadvertently* stall/spin, with insufficient
altitude for recovery.

He was flying his very experimental glider with a Ventus B fuselage,
Ventus 2 wings, and probably the tailplane of his own design. Since he
was in competition, he probably set the C.G. far back near the aft
limit, but with the experimental configuration, there was no factory
defined limit, so who knows where it actually was. Only he knew what
the stall characteristic of this configuration were.

Tom Knauff retraced his flight track from the logger file in a touring
motorglider, and commented that he probably would have done the same
thing in the same situation, so although he was being aggressive, he
was not being stupid. Had he made it, he would have probably won the
day by a large margin, because he would have reached a distant W facing
ridge nobody else did, which would have worked in the SW winds that day.

A lot of opinions have been offered whether this was a stupid mistake,
or a tragic freak accident that could have happened to anyone. Thanks
to previous posts, we can now decide for ourselves.

Copy 40°29.94'N 78°08.49'W . paste into maps.google.com, click
"satellite". A big green arrow will point to the location of the crash,
and the hill Peter was ridge-soaring at the time. The wind was quite
strong and from the SW -- basically straight down the main ridge at
Mifflin, which did not work.

I will always remember Peter as a great guy and a great pilot, and I'll
remember the day of his accident with sadness.

John Cochrane BB

There are two tragedies in Peter's story, I think. The first is the
loss of someone who was, by all accounts I've heard, a thoroughly
decent, generous and fine man. The second is the realization that even
someone as experienced as Peter can be lost to a stall/spin.

-John