Saturday, 17th July 2010
Posted by Geoff on 17 Jul 2010 at 09:39 pm | Tagged as: Archery, Flying
Geoff writes: Interesting day today, although probably for all the wrong reasons.
I was seriously considering going XC on the hang glider, because it was expected to be too windy for the PG, but there was a lot of cloud much of the day, and it was very windy on the Mynd, and clearly very rough from what some of the HG pilots who had flown, were saying. So we went to archery for a few hours, planning to come back for a late afternoon or evening flight.
Driving back over the Mynd, we saw an ambulance with flashing lights, and just past that a group of people packing up a hang glider well back from the usual landing. Not a good sign. We stopped to find out what had happened. The hang glider pilot had had an accidental chute deployment and had crashed. No damage to the glider, and minor injuries to him. He was checked by a doctor, and decided he didn’t want the ambulance, and was basically ok. But a very, very lucky escape.
We carried on to the parking, and sat and chatted with some others for a while – it still seemed windy. As we were chatting, a hang glider went over low on top landing approach, misjudged it, and landed on the parked cars, smashing a windscreen. Incredibly, again, there was no damage to the glider or pilot – and again, a very lucky escape. What was kind of sad though, was that the owner of the car with the smashed windscreen was the person who had the accidental deployment. Definitely not his day!
Whilst we’d been chatting, we heard the story of the policeman who drove onto the sailplane field last year (to introduce himself, he was new to the area) and managed to get in the way of a glider being towed off, and hit it with his car and wrote it (the glider) off. Then, bizarrely, blamed the gliding club for this, when he’d been driving across an airfield without notifying them first. Or, clearly, looking around him. Incredible. This is still not resolved apparently.
I did fly the HG in the end, not for long, as it switched off quite soon, but I did manage to fly and land without throwing my chute, hitting a car, or taking out a sailplane. A good result….
3 Responses to “Saturday, 17th July 2010”
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If you can find out who witnessed it/ pilots name etc, I’ll follow it up.
Long Mynd, Accidental Deployment.
Just finished filling in my BHPA Incident Report Form about my accidental deployment at the Long Mynd on Saturday 17th July.
The incident was entirely my fault and largely preventable with the fitting of a safety mechanism. I even had a chance to stop the deployment while the incident was happening but my reactions were wrong.
First let me say the Mynd is a great site and I was enjoying it immensely until the incident.
It started to go wrong I was at 3200 ft asl in a nice 5 up in a fairly high banked 360 trying to core the thermal. As I glanced around I noticed the velcro at the top of my Pod-lite harness unhooking and about ½ inch of my chute was exposed. It was kind of shocking to see and implications of a deployment just dawning.
I put my left hand on the gap trying to close the velcro while flying the glider with one hand. My immediate thought was to top land but I couldn’t see how I could do that while “one handed” flying in a thermal. I was all over the place pulling extra G’s and exposing more of the chute. As I exited the thermal, I was tipped nose down, I lost my grip on the chute, and away it fell.
I realised just too late! I should have held the handle of the chute and put both hands on the bottom bar to fly down, with control, for a top landing.
The chute deployed and the glider stopped flying and the nose pointed straight down. I was held in a head down position; I think the bridle was wrapped around the back part of my harness. I tried to unzip to get my legs out but couldn’t, the zip was stuck. I tried to kick and knee the zip velcro apart but that particular velcro stayed firm. It may have been held in tension by the bridle, not sure, why I couldn’t burst it open.
I was running out of time as the ground rushed up to meet me and my HG instinct took over as I reached out to hold the uprights and try to flare.
The nose of the glider hit first and I shot through the A frame hitting my upper arms as I went. My arms impacted the ground first and then my head.
My injuries are amazingly light. Heavy bruising to my left upper arm and shoulder, lighter bruising on my right forearm and upper arm. Cuts and bruising around my right eye.
I was examined by a doctor who happened to be out on the hill and I knew myself I would be fine. An ambulance arrived but I declined any treatment.
Taking afterwards with the local pilots who also fly with Pod-lite harnesses I learned that this risk of accidental deployment has been known about for many years (I have obviously missed this in my 12 years out of HG, I came back last year) and a simple mechanical arrangement of a flexible rod going through two loops attached to the handle of the chute stops an accidental deployment as this requires the handle to be pulled before the chute will deploy.
I feel extremely foolish that I allowed this to happen but thankful that I have another chance.
John Thompson
Hi John,
thanks for that very honest analysis of the accident, much appreciated.
Everyone makes mistakes in their flying. The important thing is to learn from them, and help others learn from them.
And we’re glad you’ve come back into hang gliding after 12 years!