Avoid what's outside your training and experience
Hang gliders are controlled by grasping a bar that hangs below the fabric delta wing and using it to shift your weight forward and aft and side to side. The shift in weight shifts the center of gravity, which causes the wing to pitch up or down and bank left or right, depending on where you shift your weight.
Seconds after the instructor and I charged off the side of a 5,000-foot mountain with glider firmly in hand, I discovered I had a problem. The practice I had relied on for more than 30 years to control an airplane simply did not apply to this aircraft.
As a lifelong airplane pilot, I had unquestioning faith in the push-pull law: Push forward and the houses get larger; pull back, the houses get smaller. When I pulled on the glider's long crossways bar, the aircraft pitched down, not up.
I had been briefed before the flight about weight-shift control and how pulling on the bar pulls the pilot's weight--the center of gravity--forward, pitching the hang glider down. Apparently the lesson hadn't sunk in, because I was surprised and bewildered by what was happening. My airplane instinct had prepared me for a pitch-up when I pulled on the bar, but here we were nose down. There weren't any houses below to get bigger, but the rocks at the bottom of the mountain sure were growing in size.
I pushed on the bar, and although my brain was programming my body for a nose-down pitching response, the infernal machine jerked up. The precious few knots of airspeed I felt brushing across my cheek began to bleed off. I feared a stall in the fragile flying wing, at which time I knew the rocks would quickly begin to grow larger.
My mind was 180 degrees out of phase with what was actually happening to the hang glider. I was in a developing pilot-induced oscillation several thousand feet above the rough California landscape.
Thank goodness it was a tandem flight and the instructor kept things from getting seriously out of control. We landed with our health intact but my ego bruised.
Flying is a finely balanced mixture of new experiences and no surprises. We fly to experience new sensations, different vistas, and unfamiliar destinations. These are some of the benefits of flying, whether in an airplane or a hang glider.
The no-surprises element in the mix has to do with the conduct of each flight. For safety's sake we strive to avoid situations that we are unprepared to handle because they are outside our training and experience. That's a pretty good description of my short flight in the hang glider.
Ideally, everything that happens in the course of a flight is familiar--or at least comfortably similar to something that we've done or seen before, so that we know what to expect next and how to handle it using familiar skills. No surprises.
It's a lofty goal, especially since we start out knowing nothing. Everything about flying is new and unfamiliar--a surprise--to the beginning student. Primary training is all about gaining the requisite knowledge and skills to take the unknowns out of basic VFR flying. With further study, training, and experience we can graduate to larger and faster aircraft and, if desired, earn the credential that allows us to fly in the clouds. Additional ratings and certificates and experience add even more to our capabilities and our ability to control the potential for surprises over a broader range of situations and conditions.
One way to go about controlling the unexpected is to think about the source of potential surprises. The first and most obvious is the airplane. It's a machine, and all the big and little pieces and parts are inherently subject to mechanical problems. Fortunately, airplanes are relatively simple machines. They're also certified, built, and regularly inspected according to federal standards, so eye-popping mechanical surprises in the airplane are rare indeed.
Each of us is familiar with the airplane that we normally fly. We know how to start the engine and are schooled in the switchology--where the switches, buttons, and dials are located and their functions. We can operate the avionics. We know the appropriate airspeeds to fly and how to manage the fuel supply. Hopefully we're conversant with all of the systems so we can operate them correctly and troubleshoot problems. That knowledge and familiarity give us the confidence needed to fly the airplane safely and well.
It's much more likely that an airplane surprise will occur because of the way it's being operated. Airplane problems often are pilot-induced problems, and those usually are caused by carelessness or a lapse in or lack of judgment. Keep those factors in check and we reduce the chance of an airplane problem to almost nil.
Not so when it comes to weather. Most of us would have a difficult time claiming that the same level of knowledge, familiarity, and confidence we have in the airplane also applies to the weather. Nature just doesn't respond to our efforts to understand and control it as do our machines. Wind, moisture, pressure, temperature--these are the inscrutable, largely invisible, and constantly changing forces that comprise the weather.
Imagine climbing in your airplane and flying off over the horizon knowing that the chances are pretty good that the engine will experience a loss of power, an instrument will malfunction, and a radio will cease to work. Given that uncertainty about the reliability of your airplane, you'd be a fool to take off. But aren't uncertainty and unreliability good words to describe the weather?
The forecasts may call for CAVU conditions, but weather stuff happens. Fog forms over the destination airport after sunset. Crosswinds kick up in advance of the front. Thunderstorms explode in the afternoon. We prepare as best we can with METARs and TAFs, en route updates from flight service, and cockpit weather displays, but there's always a nagging doubt about exactly what the weather ahead--both in distance and time--holds.
If you want to avoid big, bad surprises in your flying, focus your energies on the weather. Learn how different weather conditions affect each phase of flight--takeoff, climb, cruise, descent, and landing--and perhaps most important, how to "read" the signs and symptoms of weather.
For all its mystery, weather does follow general seasonal and regional patterns. If you have a basic understanding of that, you're well on your way to reducing the potential for surprises. Unless, of course, you decide to take up hang gliding.
Mark Twombly is a writer and editor who has been flying since 1968. He is a commercial pilot with instrument and multiengine ratings and co-owner of a Piper Aztec.
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