- Sat Nov 18, 2017 10:10 pm
#401132
On a related thread regarding HG incident reporting, NME wrote:
"Buy the USHPA digital archive https://ushpastore.com/collections/fron ... 9346102599
Read the decades of extensive accidents reports in past issues until it stopped. There is almost nothing new happening since then. SOS--different day. "
Overall, I agree with his suggestion. Those of us who have been doing this for long enough see many of the same mistakes repeating through the years. I think, however, there may be some mistakes which are not so common, but still tend to bite advancing pilots. I think it would be great to list and discuss as many as we care to. I'll start:
Mt. Diablo tend to attract brand-new H4's - pilots who've been dying to fly there, but didn't have the rating to do so until now. One of the skills many of these pilots haven't yet been exposed to much is the uphill landing. Initiating new H4's to varying degrees of uphill LZ's isn't very difficult, but there is one aspect of the skill I used to not emphasize, until the incident occurred...
The one point I never thought to emphasize regarding uphill landings is - you land going uphill. I didn't realize that there might be pilots that were so entrenched in the goal of landing into the wind, that they thought it superseded landing uphill on a significant slope. I had a H4 pilot attempt to land flying downhill ( and I do mean down a hill!) and realize too late he wasn't going to come even close to pulling it off. He tried to climb up over some low powerlines to land in an adjacent gold course. He clipped the lines, dove into an adjoining street, and woke up to a cop standing over him saying, "Are you all right, buddy?" He was lucky to have only a moderate concussion and heavily damaged wing. It was then that I realized not everyone is going to recognize that uphill landings require the commitment to edit the ingrained directive to land into the wind. I now discuss this situation with every pilot new to Mt Diablo, and I think there are plenty of other pilots who might not yet understand how to avoid such a mishap.
RM
"Buy the USHPA digital archive https://ushpastore.com/collections/fron ... 9346102599
Read the decades of extensive accidents reports in past issues until it stopped. There is almost nothing new happening since then. SOS--different day. "
Overall, I agree with his suggestion. Those of us who have been doing this for long enough see many of the same mistakes repeating through the years. I think, however, there may be some mistakes which are not so common, but still tend to bite advancing pilots. I think it would be great to list and discuss as many as we care to. I'll start:
Mt. Diablo tend to attract brand-new H4's - pilots who've been dying to fly there, but didn't have the rating to do so until now. One of the skills many of these pilots haven't yet been exposed to much is the uphill landing. Initiating new H4's to varying degrees of uphill LZ's isn't very difficult, but there is one aspect of the skill I used to not emphasize, until the incident occurred...
The one point I never thought to emphasize regarding uphill landings is - you land going uphill. I didn't realize that there might be pilots that were so entrenched in the goal of landing into the wind, that they thought it superseded landing uphill on a significant slope. I had a H4 pilot attempt to land flying downhill ( and I do mean down a hill!) and realize too late he wasn't going to come even close to pulling it off. He tried to climb up over some low powerlines to land in an adjacent gold course. He clipped the lines, dove into an adjoining street, and woke up to a cop standing over him saying, "Are you all right, buddy?" He was lucky to have only a moderate concussion and heavily damaged wing. It was then that I realized not everyone is going to recognize that uphill landings require the commitment to edit the ingrained directive to land into the wind. I now discuss this situation with every pilot new to Mt Diablo, and I think there are plenty of other pilots who might not yet understand how to avoid such a mishap.
RM