FROM THE FIRE TO THE PAN

                                                                                                Results are what you expect.  Consequences are what you get.

anonymous

 My first off-field landing came moments after my first ever low save.  Cosmic justice?  Viewed through a lens of four decades, strict justice would have left me crawling from a bent plane.  Or worse.This was the mid-70s, a high tide of interest in soaring that America has not seen since.  Enthusiasts of all ranks and ages were everywhere around our little grass strip and most, even the gurus, were new to powerless fight.  My instructor, who for her own sake I’ll call Eve, was a school teacher with summers off, and bless her heart we were keeping her busy.  The structure of operations, though adequate to place and time, would today be deemed loosey-goosey.  They kept a hand-held radio on the ground and another mounted in the single seater’s panel, but if my use of such equipment was ever addressed in training no memory of that exists…    Aborted takeoffs?  We discussed it once.A week beyond what amounted to an emasculating private pilot check ride (details on request) sobriety had worn off and I was a hotshot once more.  It was fabulous, being no longer a lowly student pilot.  After all, I’d amassed by then a grand total of well over twenty hours!Stumbling across lift in the landing pattern, I eschewed school rules and thermaled up from 600 feet AGL.  That rare success emboldened my inner fool and swaggering toward the nearest cloud seemed almost a duty.  There’s nothing in all the world like that lucky feeling!The cumulus disappeared as quickly as my altitude.  Eve had said something about chasing clouds that are higher above you than the distance to ground below, but I wasn't sure what she meant...  This must be it.Instead of snapping a one-eighty toward home I loitered over a pair of huge, open fields.  I could feel the thermal and knew another save was possible, if only I weren’t too low and too green to pull it off.  Circle after artless circle I dug my way down, now below any chance of gliding three miles back to the airport.  Cars stopped on the nearest road and a small crowd of upturned faces gathered to see what might happen.  Clumsy but determined, I delayed the inevitable for what seemed like an hour (maybe a dozen circles, five minutes tops).Meanwhile someone else was watching too.  Lee, Eve’s husband and chief everything at our gliderport slid overhead in the single-seater maybe twice as high, hung there a few moments and then climbed quickly away.  I felt like a sad comedian bombing before a tough room while the heckler (Lee) got all the laughs.  If they started chucking rotten fruit I’d soon be low enough to hit!At 300 feet even I had to face facts and make an important decision.  The two fields below were each perfectly flat with easy access from the road.  One was recently burned off and almost black (source of my lost thermal?), the other was freshly plowed.  So which should I land in?  Why, the wrong one, of course!I thought I flew the landing correctly, and still do in fact, but the slowdown was a terrific shock.  The main wheel smacked a couple big upturned chunks of dirt and then the moment it was down to stay it instantaneously STOPPED.  FAPPALLUMP.  The Blanik’s reinforced nose was pounding ground before I even began my useless yank back on the stick.  Choking dust settled over the wings a quarter inch thick as I stepped from the cockpit, sneezed and bowed to the gallery.  Then all heads turned to where Eve was landing in the tow plane, straight toward us.Evidently somebody’d seen this movie before.  From the cockpit floor she withdrew a broom.  She’d have plenty of time while I was sweeping a truckload of dirt from the glider to make something positive of all this.  Such a wealth of material!  Where to begin?She didn’t ask “Why did you circle out of the pattern?” or “Why'd you go beyond range from the airport?” or even “Why get so low before committing to land?”  Surely she’d have been watching as she made her own approach, and she knew the answer to those questions anyway.  What baffled her was my choice of a soft, lumpy plowed field rather than the smoother, firmer burnt one next to it.I picked that field because I was an idiot, though even idiots have their reasons.  I wanted to avoid getting ash all over the Blanik… and instead got dirt all over the Blanik.  (Ash hoses off quick and clean, dust turns to gooey mud.)  What should have been obvious but obviously wasn’t:  this spongy loam, ideal for stopping short, would slow our takeoff roll and lengthen the run enormously.Eve also brought a different towline, much shorter, kept for launching from short fields.  She briefed me to deploy flaps, to lift off sooner.  Fine advice, but scarcely enough for an idiot who’d never done this before.  She must have mentioned also that towing from any dusty surface is utterly blinding for the glider pilot until both aircraft rise above twenty or thirty feet, but that didn’t stick to my brain until I saw it for real.  The towline disappeared a few yards ahead into a pulsing brown fog, and instead of silky ash, zillions of microscopic rocks were peppering the canopy’s soft plastic.  I’d left my sunglasses on the wing, naturally, and fistfulls of grit now flowed from the air vent straight into my eyes.The idea was to let the glider lift off by itself rather than slow both planes and degrade control pulling up prematurely, but I couldn’t resist.  The towline angled suddenly down.  Fearing a full power crash, I pushed over – too much of course, and the line moved upward.  Eve was finally aloft just as I banged back down.  That slowed her, so by the time I lifted off again, she was down again.  We hopped like this twice more as a fence somewhere ahead drew closer.  I couldn't see it but she could.  If she rocked for me to release I wouldn’t see that either.  If she cut me loose to clear the fence would I have room to get down and stopped?  Dreading the worst I reached for the lever, but just then we both got airborne together and she finally appeared above the dust.WHEW!Everything else came later.It must be said at this point that if anyone, solo student or rated pilot, flew that way at our operation these days, even in their own aircraft, they would be GROUNDED, forbidden to fly here perhaps permanently.  And for ample reasons.Most accidents grow from errors or technical problems compounded one upon another by faulty awareness and decision making – or a lack of either.  The particular sequence above should sound ridiculous today, but that’s exactly how it happened.  Dismissing the untidy fact that we actually got away with it, it’s a classic example of chained errors feeding Satan’s furnace.  I started it by improperly thermaling up out of the landing pattern.  Oozing overconfidence, I immediately flew too far away and then stayed there until too low to glide back.  At this breakneck pace, choosing the wrong field for my first out-landing you could pretty much make book on.  In retrospect, Eve’s decision to attempt a relight from there – or to let me fly alone again, ever – could have been the single biggest mistake.  And for the final straw I forgot my sunglasses.  Only one piece missing:  the obligatory accident.Oh well, there’s always next time.