Tad's nightmare post (tough on server)

[Bob Kuczewski]

Tad came up with a post that seems to hang the server. This is a place for testing it out...

Please note that the title "Tad's nightmare post" doesn't apply to the content of his post, but instead refers to the fact that the forum would not seem to accept the text.

Tad emailed me the text and I tried to post it myself. It hung up on me as well.

So I wrote a few Java programs which chopped the post up word by word and I had posted them to this topic to test them. Because they were so long, I ended up deleting them to make this topic at least a little more readable.

I ended up spending about 5 hours just trying to get Tad's post onto this forum. So the phrase "Tad's nightmare post" was describing that difficulty and not intended as a comment on his content.

[Bob Kuczewski]

OK, that last post was a filtered version of Tad's post where only the following characters were allowed:

Code: Select all

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz \n ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

All spaces were also substituted by newlines ( '\n' ). At least the post went through!!

[Bob Kuczewski]

Sam,

I went back to read the first page, can you believe that, and failed to verify the dates of the earlier posts.

BTDT. Makes your head swim quite a bit when when you finally catch it and shoot through the time warp.

Let me say, there is a lot about flight theory, if that's the correct term, that goes right over my head.

However, when I see others who are so committed to the sport, it does make me put forth a little more effort to understand other's points of view.

Some more good news is that this has zilch to do with the points of views of anybody but Sir Isaac Newton. Hang gliding is the only branch of aviation that's opinion based. As soon as we start doing it by the numbers - the way everyone else does - we're gonna start seeing a lot less death and destruction and getting a lot more airtime and having a lot more fun.

I like BillC's example of teaching a 4yr old to ride a bicycle. No technical manual required.

Yes and no.

Let's make him a six year old to make things a little easier.

I used to teach on the dunes at Kitty Hawk Kites. I think we had a minimum weight cutoff of eighty pounds so we didn't get any six year olds. But let's build a trainer over which a sixer would have sufficient control authority.

In a light mild breeze you could probably train a sixer to foot launch, make turns around pylons on his way down the slope, and land safely. All that's pretty intuitive.

I sure wouldn't want to let him get into a situation in which he was unexpectedly pointed back towards the dune with a tailwind. The response to that situation is extremely counterintuitive. That's a lot of what got John Seward killed at Packsaddle a bit over a year ago. And he was four and a third times as old as a sixer.

But we are adults and there are some technical aspects of HG that need to be understood.

We don't build the gliders. And the people who DO build the gliders know what they're doing and are responsible in getting them up to and well beyond certification standards so we're off the hook for most of the tough stuff. About the only thing in which they're currently grossly negligent is leaving aerotow releases to the scum that run the flight parks versus building them in properly like they do in REAL aviation.

We know how to foot launch, thermal, and - for those who must - loop.

Only the best of us know how to approach and land. Standups and spots are maimers and killers. We need to start watching how landings are done in real fixed wing aviation and duplicating it.

Especially towing safety.

Towing safety - as, for the most part, it's currently implemented - is an oxymoron.

Here's where the six year old kid with a kite is gonna kick our asses almost to the same degree that the vultures and swallows do with respect to free flight. This is primarily why my forum is called "Kite Strings".

A sixer wants to go out with his kite, get as much airtime and altitude as possible, and bring it back home in one piece. He accomplishes this by running and blasting it into the air with a lot of tension, often with the aid of a launch assistant at the downwind end, on a zero stretch string many times stronger than what will be needed for the job and regulating the tension in accordance with what he sees the kite actually doing. He doesn't use weak links, auto release mechanisms, tension gauges, or radios and he doesn't let go of the string every time things get a bit out of kilter.

And just by applying a bit of common sense this kid is often gonna do a lot better than the brain dead twits running the aerotow parks and operations.

Adam Parer - 2009/11/25

Due to the rough conditions weak links were breaking just about every other tow and the two tugs worked hard to eventually get everyone off the ground successfully.

In The Beginning... We didn't know that we needed to hook the towline up to the either the pilot or a bridle running between the pilot and hang point. But by 1979/09/26 Brian Pattenden had figured that out and announced it to a meeting of the Norfolk Hang Gliding Club in Suffolk (England).

And most of the rest of the important stuff...

Manned Kiting
The Basic Handbook of Tow Launched Hang Gliding
Daniel F. Poynter
1974

"The greatest dangers are a rope break or a premature release." - Richard Johnson

The tow line should be ... made of 2000+ lb. material...

Broken ropes have put many kite flyers in the hospital and a few in the ground.

"A bad flyer won't hurt a pin man but a bad pin man can kill a flyer." - Bill Bennett

The boat should not fly him wide open because a burst of speed may be needed to pick him up at one point.

Often a flyer who appears to be in a hopeless position at 6', recovers and continues to fly.

"Never take your hands off the bar." - Tom Peghiny

...we had known LONG before.

The six year old who's flown the kite on the beach from the upwind end of the string and down the dunes from the bottom end of the hang strap instinctively understands this common sense stuff.

The twenty-six year old computer programmer who is "trained" at a flight park and/or reads Towing Aloft generally suffers irreversible brain damage - long before he gets the chance to stall or lock out and further scramble things - and almost immediately starts "thinking", sounding, equipping, and flying like the perpetrators.

None of this is rocket science. Let's get the hell away from efforts to understand others' goddam points of view and back to reality, basics, common sense.

Thanks for your contributions here on US Hawks forum.

And thanks much for participating in the conversations - let's keep 'em going.

And let's keep hitting people where it hurts Davis and Jack. Or cut out the middlemen. Either way I'm totally cool with it.

[SamKellner]

Thanks Bob,

I got thru the 2% version.

Tad,

I, er, uh, yes, surely