Hello Tom, I really don't have an axe to grind here. You said…
>>there have been more incidents/close calls and worse from the land straight >>and dick around for ten minutes pilots than from those carefully taxiing off. My glider has a steerable tail wheel, so I have the ability to veer off the strip in an alarming fashion. I was given a telling off from an instructor of a hundred times my experience for deviating from a straight line at the end of my landing run. This deviation was not alarming but a gently turn. >From memory the situation was that I had landed centrally on the bitumen and when the glider was towards the end of its roll, turned off the bitumen strip and rolled across the grass to the edge of the strip. The grass is wide enough that two or even three gliders could land there. The point the instructor made was that in a comp, there could be a number of other gliders landing all around and there is no way that I could be sure that the sides of the strip were clear and therefore it was unsafe to turn. The alternative, appears to be to stop and then dick around for five minutes… and it is a while… open canopy, release harness, release static line, release pee tube, spray cockpit, climb out and get legs to work, check for traffic and then pull the glider off the strip. Neither situation is particularly satisfactory, but my feeling is that the straight run is safer than turning without looking (because looking is impossible). How does one "carefully taxi off" without an initial turn to look? D _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
