As promised, here's another video of a hairy glider landing. This one occurred when a Genesis 2 pilot came back to land at CCSC during a thunderstorm during a contest.
According to what I've read, he was getting bounced around quite a bit and hit a ton of sink right near the field. As you'll see, it was raining pretty hard and the field appeared to be soaked. That's part of what made the resulting ground loop pretty uneventful--well, that and the fact that the Genesis has a very small tail boom.
Other pilots who landed shortly before this one simply stayed in the gliders, partly to stay dry and partly to keep "flying" them if the wind kicked up.
Last season I witnessed a Genesis 2 pilot come back to Truckee as a storm approached and watched him almost not make the runway because of massive sink.
Yikes. Fly safe, guys...
Posted by jzawodn at July 02, 2007 07:45 AM
Informative comments from jsrobertss on YouTube, quoted below for convenience:
"At 5 miles out [the pilot] was told there was light rain. It changed very quickly to a major downpour with strong crosswinds. The glider came in fast because he was in strong sink and had to clear trees at the end of the runway. Visibility was poor because of the rain pounding his canopy and at the last instant he saw another glider on the runway where he would have stopped. He veered to the right at the wrong instant to avoid colliding with the other glider (unseen in this video)."
"The other glider which had landed just before this one had tried to turn to the left but skidded on the wet grass. His glider didn't turn left but it spun around partly and he watched this glider coming at him. This was a glider racing competition and many gliders were coming in. Several other gliders landed in fields and a few were damaged."
Cool video! That pilot must be a very good one to be able to do what he did in that type of situation. I'm still a little leary of going up in something that doesn't have an engine, though.
