Tim Shirley wrote:
Pilots are responsible for landing gliders safely - not contest directors, rule-makers or anyone else. The pilot in command must decide how and where it is safest to land. If a competition pilot does something irresponsible or unsafe, there should of course be a penalty - but you can't define responsibility or safety by rules or numbers.
I strongly agree.
When I first started flying competitions I had great difficulty in finishing under 1,000ft above the airfield (even in 2003 some comps required a finish below 1,000ft) - partly as I was still learning confidence in my final glide computer but also because I did not feel I had the skill levels to handle circuit from say 500ft whilst being number six to land, with no go round! So I was arriving at about 120kts plus (which made me a bit nervous in any case) and pushing forward hard to squeeze beneath the 1,000ft limit!
Unfortunately, practising competition style finishes was illegal until recently, and so the only practice opportunities were at competitions. Gradually I gained the confidence and skill to feel comfortable with finishing at about 500ft and 100kts plus and since then I have continued to work on this and now feel comfortable finishing at 50ft and more than100kts.
Thanks to the work of the GFA, it is now legal to practice these finishes (there is a very good OD that lays out how to go about this including radio calls) and so I do this regularly at DDSC to make sure I stay current and furthermore gain experience in a variety of conditions: one low finish recently was conducted through rain and ended up as a straight in as a result of the loss of performance at high speed - a very useful experience to have had!
The OD is available at the GFA web site:- http://www.gfa.org.au/Docs/ops/OD 01-06.doc -- Robert Hart [EMAIL PROTECTED] +61 (0)438 385 533 http://www.hart.wattle.id.au _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
