Our tasks for day two all involved collapses. I wasn’t so worried about this part of the course because it isn’t so violent and it seems the most relevant to me. First exercise was inducing a frontal, by pulling down both A risers. As usual, my first attempt was a little hesitant, so I got to do it a second time – lucky me! Tony showed us all up by not pulling the risers, but pulling the centre A lines only. The glider shrimped (a big horseshoe, where the tips touch in front of you). I’m not sure if it looked more impressive or scary.

The second exercise was to induce a big collapse and fly with it, steering straight and then doing 360 degree turns into the open side and then into the collapsed side. It’s just like flying normally, and I could have happily done just this exercise for the rest of the course, but Fabien had other ideas. Next came dynamic collapses. We had to start a big oscillation and on the forward pitch, you grabbed one of the A risers and yanked it, causing the collapse, then correcting the rotation, and getting out the collapse. Next was collapse with full speed bar (not for me though! I couldn’t find my speedbar despite an extended rummage in my harness).

Then we did autorotation. This involves pitching, inducing the collapse on the swing forward and holding it to get into a rotation which you need to then sort out. I discovered on this exercise how strong my subconscious self-preservation instinct really is. Reluctant as ever to really go for it, I wasn’t pitching enough (“More, more, more, Judith, more brake!”) to really get the swing on the collapse, and I would then unintentionally keep a little inside break on, which dampens the rotation straight away. So I did the right thing for the real situation, but the purpose of the exercise was, of course, to do things full pelt in a safe environment to learn stuff. The other thing I was finding difficult was the co-ordination thing. I’ve always thought of myself as having quite good general co-ordination, but making your hands do different things and then remembering to pull my knees up at the same time, proved to be quite a challenge for me. Pulling your knees up is really important if you fly a pod harness, for reasons we were to discover later.

Meanwhile, Geoff was getting the bigger picture a lot better than me and was trying to do the maneuvers more radically, despite the fact that it’s more difficult to bend a 1/2 glider out of shape than a higher performance glider. On his last flight he was doing one more autorotation when his radio failed. He was supposed to only do one rotation and then recover, instead he did four, waiting for the instruction to pull out. Fabien meanwhile was shouting for him to pull out, then to pull his reserve. On the fourth rotation Geoff realised that he was very low, pulled out elegantly, but just in time. One more turn and he would have plopped straight into the water. On top, our launch marshal, Gil, was saying that he though someone was in trouble. When asked how he knew, he pointed out that you could hear the outboard in the background of the radio transmissions. Fabien was calling to Geoff to abandon his landing and go for the water, but not having heard him, and given how much Geoff hates cold water, he went for a downwind landing beyond the river instead. He only just managed to scrape onto dry land. A cut eyebrow was the only damage, and he got a ride in the boat as it was easier to collect him by water than walk out and be collected by car.

We headed back for the de-brief and had an individual planning session for what we would do on our final day. By this time, we could see what Fabien was trying to achieve. All the maneuvers end with a big surge, so if you can control the pitch, control the rotation and maintain your course, then you have the basics for a recovery from most problems. Building up our skills to reinforce these lessons allowed us to progress to the next level with each exercise.

Unfortunately, Tony had to go back to work, so couldn’t do a third day and we had to say good bye to him.

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