uzhsieniechiu oficialaus asmens “forumine” analize ir patarimai zhmogui ,kuris nori bandyti keltis paskui kateri.
The last time we had a fatal accident here in Oregon, it was a guy who was
boat towing. He’d been proficient at static-line boat towing 35 years ago at the
dawn of the sport, and was bound-and-determined to do it again. He was
flying a Falcon 195, using his own home-built webbing harness. He wanted
to ski-launch like they did it “back then”, with a water start in the river.
He’d been down to Florida to do some training, and had been cautioned about
how to do towing these days. He purchased some floats for his glider, and
then proceeded to ignore virtually every good common sense rule we have
about towing. He used a short static line, a home-made release at each
end, an untrained boat crew, on a river where there’s wind aloft shielded
by tall trees along the banks. He tried to water-start, using skis and wearing
a shorty wetsuit.
Several hours later, the weaklink was gone, because it kept breaking under
the tow pressure of the line. The release was gone, same reason. We don’t
really know what the “plan” was to release the line, and maybe there wasn’t
one. We’ll never know. They revved up the boat, and finally managed to yank
him clear of the water. The glider flew up at a very high rate of climb, with
such force that it began to pull the stern out of the water. And then it hit the
shear zone as it cleared the treetops. The additional airspeed caused the
glider to attempt to climb even harder, and that’s when the zig-zag stitching
of the home-made harness zippered.
The harness came apart, leaving the main body loop attached to the glider.
The pilot and the rest of the harness came down from 100+ feet, possibly
with a head impact on the basetube as he went by. He hit the water very
hard and died of internal ruptures almost instantly. He was an airline captain
in ‘real life’, so he wasn’t unfamiliar with aviation and risk evaluation. The
glider, now released from the pilot (who retained the towline), glided down
the river and landed undamaged in the water.
Our evaluation of the accident came down to this:
– Failure to apply current practices
– Lack of training for boat crew
– Old, unsafe harness, not built to current standards
– Probable mental impairment due to hypothermia after extensive time in
cold river water.
– Safety systems bypassed
– Unsuitable site
We learned about this accident while we were sitting around at a HG club
meeting and saw it on TV news. We all looked around and asked, “Who?”
It turned out that it was the guy who had started our club, many years ago. Had
he only contacted someone locally, we could have helped him to go towing
safely. But he didn’t, and now he’s dead, leaving a widow and kids to cope.
A totally preventable accident.
