singh@glacier.ARPA (Harinder Singh) (02/12/86)
------------------------------- Yes, "routine emergency" *is* a bit of a contradiction in terms, isn't it? But if you are winch-launching gliders on a hot day from a strip on the edge of a desert state in India, at the peak of the blazing hot summers, then it almost makes sense. For those un-familiar with gliding or with winch launching, let me explain. A glider can either be towed aloft by a power aircraft (aerotow) or ground-launched. One of the ways of ground launching involves a *winch* at the other end of the runway, with a steel cable running the length of the runway and attaching to a belly hook on the glider. Winches have pretty strong engines driving the drum onto which the cable is pulled and coiled; a winch operates sort of like a powered fishing-reel, pulling the glider towards it. The takeoff roll tends to be *very* brief indeed, with extremely rapid acceleration. The belly-hook location of the cable can cause the glider to climb at a steep angle right after lift-off, leading to trouble if the take-off should need to be aborted at a low altitude due to a cable break or power loss. And, cable breaks used to occur *frequently*, sometimes as many as a half-dozen on a hot day with an aging cable. I was logging time towards my private licence, and this was to be a check-ride with my CFI, one Mr. Rajagopalan. The take-off was going well - I held the stick forward to keep from climbing too steeply, passed 50 feet, 100 feet, 200 feet, all the while thinking "straight ahead, straight ahead" in case of a "routine emergency" until we crossed 250 feet. By this time one needs to be pulling back quite hard to grab the maximum altitude before having to release the cable over the winch. At 450 feet it happened. The cable broke, the glider pitched up sharply and I did the usual recovery - stick forward immediately, release cable, hand on spoilers, turn for a mini-circuit and landing. Quite un-eventful, except that I turned right into a thermal. "Darn", I thought, "no soaring allowed below 600 feet - just my luck". But there came a voice from the rear cockpit, "Keep turning, Inder, let's work it". Up through 500 feet, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand. Wow, what a thermal. "Keep going", said the voice from behind. I hadn't done that much soaring in my whole life and needed occasional help centering the thermal or when it threatened to throw me out. We finally called it quits after crossing six thousand feet although the thermal showed no signs whatsoever of weakening. With great regret I opened the spoilers to get us back down. Total flight time not much more than an hour, but boy! What an end to an aborted take-off. ------------------------ I have, unfortunately, an un-happy post-script to add to this story. I went on to get my private ticket, and Mr. Rajagopalan went on to set a long distance record (I think). But his willingness to break his own rules led, from what I understand, to his tragic death in a crash at the same airfield. There was no other flying in the vicinity, so all we had in the air for much of the time was just one glider. Mr. Rajagopalan would sometimes fly the high-performance sailplane, an Indian aircraft called "Mrigasheer", in which he was making his distance attempts. When he came in for a landing, especially the last one of the day with a setting sun, he sometimes made a fancy high-speed swoop by cutting across the "threshold numbers" from a left downwind pattern location to right downwind, setting up immediately for a tight right base into a curving short final. It was exquisitely beautiful to watch, the low altitude (two to three hundred feet at the start), the high speed that made the sailplane sound like a jet going overhead, the steep curving turns, the long flare and the roll-out to the hangar. On that last flight his luck, and altitude, ran out. His wingtip touched the ground just before the runway threshold and the glider cartwheeled, slamming the cockpit into the ground with a force that left a small crater. Mr. Rajagopalan was a young man when he died, and had recently been engaged to be married. Thinking of him still sometimes stops me in my tracks, especially if I'm about to do something somewhat borderline.... -------------------------------------------------