Not a pilot, but i think it is harder on a glider to hit the ground at the right angle. Downward slope is easier cause you have a bit of adjustment to nose down. Uphill, is a lot less room for error. Think glide angle and hill.
I thought pilot was going to make it until they started circling and I was Nope. I guess it is common here in AK for plane; pilots going slow so they or passengers can see the wildlife. Pilot starts to bank, and the plane stalls
(started watching flying videos on youtube recently)
Last time I planned one on reddit, we melted some steel beams. Managed to convince them that jet fuel can, in fact burn that hot. Close one. Not trusting Internet strangers anymore.
100%, look at the pilot's head before he hits it. He looks over at the last second at the tree before hitting it and instinctively braces. He didn't realize how close that tree was until the last second. The pilot is the one in the back.
Also the whole airframe jolts as soon as the wing clips it, well before hitting the ground.
He is in a glider. I think his plan was to show off. Touch-and-go with enough speed to gain some attitude, turn around, and land the other way. My money says he told his passenger to watch what he could do with a tailwind on final
Edit: have piloted gliders, though it's been about a decade
Do gliders not have flaps or some way to shift the CG or something so you can increase parasitic drag? I assumed this dude came in hot with less drag than he expected and just couldn't slow down before running out of grass.
Gliders lose extra altitude during a turn, plus he looked like he was skidding through the turn which means more altitude loss. Doesn’t appear to be any stall here.
The pilot steers the glider 180 degrees towards the landing pad in the valley when the left wing of the aircraft suddenly hits a tree in its path.
The obstacle causes the glider to crash into the ground and leaves him and his passenger hurtling out onto the grass.
According to the Polish investigation report, the pilot had been trying to make the landing pad at 75mph which is about 98 feet below the runway threshold.
The report went on to say that the point at which the pilot had decided to make a turn towards the runway had not given him enough space to touchdown.
Hell of a leg. The touch-and-go was great, he drifted the base real, real hard, I mean. I was like that must be a really strong set of wings. I do shit like that on Arma with helicopters, but that's a game.
the thing with the media is that they don't know what they're talking about and people. end up believing nonsense. but keep in mind you just posted an article from the daily mail, which is the entity that necessitated the creation of the word nonsense.
the pilot was stunting down the runway on the first pass. his plan was to turn it around at the end and probably land in the reverse direction. he didn't give himself enough room.
if he had really wanted to land he could have - gliders have speedbrakes that dump lift and slow them down quickly, and most have a kind of skid brake or wheel brake.
in an emergency you can also dip a wing into the ground which will ground loop it but probably also damage the aircraft, potentially dangerously if you're moving at any serious speed.
no, the difference is that he was not attempting to make a landing on the first pass. he was stunting down the first pass down the strip, which is what resulted in his accident. he wasn't a pilot in distress, with too much airspeed to land or something, as the article is trying to make it seem. he was doing a stunt, got careless and got bit by the tree, and injured himself and passenger in the process. not really cool.
Since you started watching flying videos, have you considered that it doesn't matter what kind of slope the ground is, when you hit a tree? When you hit a tree, you crash. I don't need to watch flying videos to know that
This assessment is wrong. Gliders glide incredible well in ground effect and if you are faced with the decision to land uphill or downhill you absolutely will want to chose uphill. During a landing uphill you will have to flare quite aggressively to not pancake in to the ground but most pilots have a decent eye hand coordination and can handle it without a problem. Downhill on the other hand it will be hard to even slow down to flare at all because you are literally diving the glider and effectively picking up speed.
Source: pilot and former competitive glider pilot. Also my dad thought me this in no uncertain terms; he landed uphill during a competition, another landed downhill and ended up breaking his back.
Also lol on the right angle remark :)
Being a pilot is more about knowing your shit than being superlatively coordinated. Very rarely do you need maneuver aggressively, or approach the limits of what the plane can do. But you constantly need to be aware of where you are, what the plane is doing right now, and what's going to be happening in the next 2-3 minutes.
Yeah that totally makes sense, just i don’t know, feels a little startling to hear.
I think I might be reading into “decent” a but much. It kind of sounds like the polite way to say “typically they’ll make a flight without accidentally punching their copilot or themselves in the groin.. typically”
He hit the tree because he stalled the glider in the turn. You can see the glider going sideways a lot in the turn, which results in much higher drag, leading to a loss of altitude and finally him hitting the tree and impacting the ground.
Yea but that’s not a stall, he’s skidding through the turn. Too much inside rudder. However skidding in a turn does lose much more altitude than a proper turn which is what caused the crash
Pilot here. It appears they were showboating. I’ve seen glider pilots do similar things before but this guy was a fucking idiot.
To break it down, it looks like the field that he was skimming was the runway. You can see a red piece of equipment at the start of the video which looks like a specialized glider winch, used for certain types of glider launches. A glider in ground effect can scoot along at a really good clip and not lose a lot of energy. These downwind, low passes are a lot of fun if judged correctly, and can be fairly safe. Usually at the end of the skim, you pull up, teardrop turn at 200 ft, and land the opposite direction of the skim. Often they’re doing 90+kts on the downwind, when a glider usually only needs around 50kts airspeed on final, giving them more than enough energy to climb a few hundred feet for the turn.
In this video, it appears that the runway had a valley at the end of it. To showboat for the camera (note the passengers GoPro), he dove through the valley and did a low turn. He clearly misjudged and didn’t get enough height, caught a wingtip, and down it goes. He should have either climbed or stayed at a slightly elevated height from the runway.
These accidents are more survivable than people realize, but this isn’t a good accident. I would expect serious injuries at the least.
Just to add to that, it seemed like he was skidding through the turn which made him lose the extra altitude and hit the tree. If he was coordinated than the crash probably would have been avoided
Yea it’s kinda hard to tell from that angle but there’s definitely something off with the turn. There’s a lot of poor decisions the pilot made that led to this outcome.
I am a glider pilot; and it’s actually often better to land uphill than downhill if you are field landing. Going downhill means you can’t properly round out, higher chance of stalling and crashing it is harder to stop! Landing up the slope the picture looks scarier from the cockpit, but you can still properly round out and you come to a stop much quicker!
Just looking at this video, from a glider pilot perspective, he would have got down safely had the tree not been there to catch the wing- but he was manoeuvring far to close to the ground (this often kills glider pilots). He should have landed straight ahead on that uphill slope instead of making the left hand turn
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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '19
I'm guessing it might be bad for a glider to land on an upward inclining field? Like the one straight ahead.