Met with Martin yesterday to take a look at my Fun 160 which is stroed temporarily at the factory. I just wanted to see if there had been any other damage to it when I crashed last month. I had not taken it out of the bag since.
So apart from a bent downtube, a few grass marks, it was perfect!
Martin helps me clean the leading edge joints and lube them wth linseed oil
The reason for the linseed oil? It was damn hard to spearate the leading edge becuase there was a bit of alt corrosion in the joint. This is Steve Elliot and Martin tugging away. They eventually managed it. No bend in the leading edge, which was great.
I learned a bit more about my glider yesterday so thanks guys!
Today got the call from Martin that a bunch of pilots were heading to the Boneyard, so I decided to go down for a gander and fly vicariously through them...
I always feel strange driving through the graves to get to the site.
I arrived just in time to see Steve Elliot crawl out of the trees after a bit of an unexpected landing with the Malibu. A gust took him and turned him completely around. no harm done to the glider. Steve had a bit of a bloody face and a graze on his shin. I was warned not to post a photo of his bloody face :)
Sacrifice in the name of progress eh?
The Malibu does look very very nice, and flies like a dream so I hear. I can't imagine it being better than my lovely Fun though ;)
A big Yeay! for Gerolf who is leading the Hang Gliding European Championships in Austria! Fingers crossed for the rest of the comp!
Follow the results here
This is a photo of some of the terrain they have to fly through. Poor things :)
Hiya. Sorry for not blogging in so long. Hard to type with a broken wrist. As you can see in the video below, I had a bit of an incident with a tow. At the very start of the tow course I was on in beautiful Gloucester, country NSW, I managed to do a bit of a crash landing.
Here is how I see it and others also:
I lift the dolly up a bit. The glider nose pops
The weaklink breaks low, if you watch in slowmo you see if breaks right after I let go of dolly I do not pull in. I guess my idea was to flare, but this was way too early in the process to do this as I lost all control
I take my legs out of harness, and at this stage I also should have gone onto the uprights
With little control, the wind took the glider, left wing banked, and I just went with it.
As you see I almost crashed in the glider that was sitting there, so I banked even further to avoid this
I took my hands off the speedbar at the very last minute but it was too late for my right hand because I bent the wrist quite badly
My last thoughts before hitting the ground were "oh shit this is going to hurt". Not very helpful words, but as you can see if never gave up trying to flare until the very end lol ;)
And at least I was matching. Very important to get the gear right ;)
Full video taken by Louise
Look about 1 minute into this to get a front view of the fateful tow. You can almost see the expression of confusion on my face!
4 minutes in..this was an earlier tow I did...everything going smoothly!
The hanger and setup in Gloucester
Lou, Nathan and Curt. Thank you sooo much to Nathan and Lou who drove me from hospital to hospital and waited and waited..... :)
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