My Flying

In aircraft crash investigation they often talk of the chain of events. This is an occurrence of certain events that take place leading up to a crash, where if any one of the events had or had not occurred, the crash would most likely have been averted.

This is today's chain of events. Firstly, during the DI of the Twin I noticed that the gear not-down warning buzzer's battery was flat. I removed the unit and as no replacement battery was available I reported this to the instructor on duty. We would fly without it.

The glider is towed to 08. I drive down to the winch to watch the launches from there and to start learning how to operate the winch. The cellphone rings. Did I check the Twin's radio during the DI as it is now not working. I report that I did and that it was working fine. The second link is created. So we send a spare handheld unit to use for operations.

After watching three launches I head to the launch point for my flights. A new instructor F(6) greets me, and though he is extremely experienced, he hasn't instructed for some time now. Link number three. The first flight goes well enough and we soar the ridge for ½ hour before landing. After 10 minutes into the second flight I decide to land, as practising circuits is more important to me. At this point the battery on the handheld starts to die; link number four starts to form. On the extended downwind leg I hear the instructor behind me trying to use the radio and link number four is completed.

So my finals are messy (as usual, though I am trying very hard). I hold off on touch down. The glider sounds like it hits the ground hard, but there is no bounce, just these horrible scrapping grinding sounds and small bits of grass and dust entering into the cockpit. The plane stops and we both wonder, what the hell happened? The answer: The gear is still up.

Link 1: non functioning no-gear-down warning buzzer. Link 3: an instructor other than the one that was briefed regards link 1. Links 2 and four, during the downwind part of the circuit I did not completed my downwind checks and as the radio's non operation caused a distraction, this was never noticed. And so the chain of events was completed.

Rather scary how all the pieces seem to just fall into place after the event. Fortunately, as the grass was nice a green and soft, the glider only lost some of it’s paint and was up and operating a few minutes later.

I took one last short flight later that day. Mucked up just about everything, except the launch, which I though went very well. So that's three flights with a total of 49 minutes equals 193,20ZAR and a BIG lesson learned.