By : Allan Ash

It may disturb some people to remind them that there are inherent dangers in flying gliders but it would be even more disturbing to ignore the fact.

Most efforts towards improving safety in soaring (and in flying generally) are aimed at the area of operations and, while improving operational procedures will undoubtedly increase safety, I don’t believe that is the main area in which accidents are caused. Oh yes, they happen in the operations area but this doesn’t mean they originated in that area.

I believe many, if not most, accidents have their beginnings in the minds of the pilots! They were just not mentally prepared to face a sudden emergency.

We are all familiar with that hackneyed phrase that gives the cause of an accident as “pilot error”. It’s so easy after the event, in the cool calmness of a committee meeting (or more likely a remote government office) to say the accident wouldn’t have happened if the pilot had done this instead of that.

But those making this judgement did so after many hours, or perhaps day, of contemplating all the evidence, with lengthy debate over a host of fine points. They were not in the cockpit at the time of the crisis, perhaps having faced the physical and mental strain of a long and arduous flight in difficult conditions, and then be faced suddenly with the need to make a vital decision and only split seconds to decide whether to do this or that.

So the pilot made a wrong choice! So, probably, would eight out of ten other pilots under the same circumstances.

Perhaps this is an extreme example, but in more than fifty years of flying (mostly sailplanes but some light aircraft) I’ve faced many hazards that demanded an instant or almost instant decision and/or action, and in very few of these has the decision-making time been more than a couple of seconds. It would surprise me if this hasn’t been the norm for most pilots.

My suggestion for relieving at least some of the pressure of an emergency was set out in an editorial I wrote for the June 1954 issue of “Australian Gliding”. I believed then that my suggestion had merit. I’ve practised the suggestion ever since and I continue to believe it is at least one way in which the accident rate can be reduced.

In the editorial I recommended that pilots learn to think ahead of problems that could arise and ways of handling them. When the winch cable breaks at 2000 feet in conditions of a gusty crosswind with tall trees on all sides of the runway, it is too late to ask yourself “What should I do now?” You should have asked that question before you got into the cockpit, and you should not have taken off without having decided on the right answer.

Thinking ahead saves valuable time when an emergency finally arrives. During my early days of aerotow launches I used to look around constantly and pick out emergency landing fields. I’d ask myself : “If the rope broke now, where would I land”? I was never happy until I could give myself a good, sensible answer. This early mental training has always made my cross country soaring more comfortable.

Instructors today still occasionally ask their student pilots to complete an approach, sometimes a whole circuit, with the altimeter covered. I’ve had them pull this on me sometimes when I am making a check-flight while visiting a new club, but since I flew for the first couple of years of my gliding life in gliders that had no instruments at all, the exercise never bothered me.

What it did however was to keep me in practice at flying with less than a full panel. This practice proved useful a few times when, for various reasons. The sailplane I was flying had an unserviceable ASI or variometer. I found I could fly quite safety for extended periods by the seat of my pants.

At the other extreme, I once heard of a world contest pilot who declared his aircraft unairworthy and refused to fly it because someone had removed the yaw string!

As I mentioned earlier, it is too late to ask yourself what you should do when a potential accident is staring you in the face. It is much easier and safer to do the thinking beforehand and to rehearse, and even practise, your response. This rehearsal or practise should become such a part of your flying that you can do it without thinking. There was a day when I was flying from Camden airfield, NSW, and was making an approach to the southern end of the field. Across the approach path lay a river with wide, steep banks, topped by a barbed wire fence marking the edge of the airfield.

As I approached the river I encountered strong sink with some loss of airspeed. It became obvious that my path was going to lead to a heavy landing on the ten or fifteen metre level ground between the river bank and the fence.

This was roughly a situation I had envisaged many times and puzzled over the best way to handle it. Then the nose of the sailplane went down into a shallow dive, gaining a few extra knots of much-needed speed. At the rim of the river bank, the sailplane was levelled for a few seconds. With the long grass swishing along the bottom of the fuselage, then a sudden snatch of the stick converted the extra speed into a couple of metres of extra height, enough to clear the fence before the nose had to be lowered again for the landing. It was all over in a few seconds.

All this, I must point out, was done without conscious thought. I had done the thinking many times during the preceding years, never knowing if or when I was likely to be faced with the necessity to use the solution I had worked out. When the emergency finally arrived, unexpectedly and unannounced, my mental training took over and got me and the sailplane safely onto the airfield.

During the decade of the sixties I thought I’d try my hand at power flying. As all power students know, there comes a time in the training schedule when, soon after takeoff, the instructor suddenly shuts the throttle and says something like “Simulated engine failure. Where are you going to land?”

I was not expecting this test on this day and the Cessna 150 had crossed the airfield boundary at about 2000 feet when the instructor slyly said “Keep your eyes peeled for other aircraft”. Like a lamb I obediently screwed my head around even more than usual to look around outside the aircraft. Then the instructor cut the throttle … but he only got the first word out before I had the Cessna in a shallow dive, turning slightly towards a field I had chosen weeks earlier as a good emergency landing area.

The instructor was amazed at my quick reaction to the sudden loss of power but I explained that my glider flying had included a lot of cable breaks, and I had learned to react quickly and positively to any loss of power.

But I must emphasise again that this road to safety is open only to those who are prepared to work at it. So on the next cold wet and windy day, find yourself a quiet spot, perhaps with a pencil and paper, and ask yourself, “What are all the things that can happen to me or to my aircraft while I am flying, and what precautions can I take to handle or eliminate them?”.

For example, if your ASI or variometer stopped working in flight, could you safely continue the flight? Have you practised flying with all or some of your instruments U/S?

What difficulty, if any, do you have getting into or out of the cockpit while wearing a parachute? Do you need to wriggle it around some obstruction? Is it likely to catch on anything as you exit, especially as you exit in a hurry? Can you get your feet out in a hurry without them tangling?

Can you locate and operate your seat belt buckle without looking at it?

If you are abandoning you aircraft in flight should you jettison the canopy before you undo your seat belt, or after? You may have perhaps one-fifth of a second to decide.

If you are about to out land in a not-too-big paddock and you suddenly find on final that your air brakes are jammed shut, is there any alternative action you can take?

Wheat about a sideslip? Will you aircraft sideslip readily? Have you practised sideslipping in it? Talk to an instructor about it.

And don’t think dive brakes don’t jam shut these days. A few years ago I watched as a fellow I know suffered this indignity. Fortunately for him, he had a 5000ft runway ahead of him. He needed almost all of it.

If you don’t ever face this particular problem, there are plenty of others just waiting for the chance to visit you. Best to start thinking up solutions now.

One of the advantages of this kind of exercise is that it gets the brain into the habit of reviewing problems and coming up with answers, and with practise comes, if not perfection, then at least improvement.

Not all emergencies can be pre-planned and guarded against by prior thinking. Some are so unique that there is no way anyone can prepare to meet them. But if pre-thinking cannot come up with a firm solution, the practice of thinking can result in a mind that is pre-conditioned to quickly assess any new problem and deal with it with a minimum of strain.

Allow me to burden you with yet another anecdote from my action-packed life.

I was being launched in a Schweizer TG3 behind a Tiger Moth. The sailplane was larger and probably heavier than the tug. It featured a midwing of wooden construction with a large fuselage of welded steel framework covered with fabric. The pilot sat very high under a huge canopy. While something of a monster to move about on the ground, the TG3 was a reasonable performer in the air.

The weather was hot and thermally and the air was rough that day. The little Tiger Moth struggled manfully to provide a rate of climb of 200 to 300 feet a minute in the hot conditions.

After one circuit of the airfield, we were at about 500ft when the terrific turbulence tossed the Tiger Moth to the left and the TG3 to the right, putting me way out of my proper position for the tow. The towrope developed a lot of slack.

As I took in the sight of the thrashing slack towrope, I saw to my dismay that it had curled around the left wingtip of the TG3 so that it now ran from the nose of the sailplane, underneath the wing, around the trailing edge, across the top of the wing and then forward to the tail of the Tiger Moth.

In my mind’s eye I could see the tug taking up the slack, the towrope tightening around the wing, breaking through the wooden trailing edge, being stopped by the TG3’s massive spar and causing the sailplane to cartwheel out of control across the sky, most likely accompanied by the hapless Tiger Moth.

From my seat in the sailplane, I saw it all happening before my eyes. But could hardly believe it. Then, quite calmly, I reached for the yellow knob and released the tow-rope from the TG3: Almost in slow motion I watched the rings float back under the wing, then reappear drifting above the upper surface without touching it, then get drawn forward, dancing and gambolling gaily behind the Tiger Moth. With a sigh of relief I turned the sailplane back towards the runway just behind us.

All this happened in a matter of seconds. Who could ever have prepared for an emergency like that? It was not I, the man, who handled the situation. It was my brain that simply reacted automatically to years of training. If I had paused to panic, all would have been lost. In any emergency, there is no time at all for panic.

Which brings me to my final injunction on the subject of safety, that is the handling of fear. Now we must realise that a certain amount of fear is a normal part of every life. Fear is not an inanimate thing. It is a living power that can and does influence human life. But it is important to realise that while fear is a good servant, it is a terrible master.

Fear as a servant is good. When you have fear, it keeps you from doing silly and dangerous things. For example, it stops you taking a winch launch during a thunderstorm. It stops you circling in the opposite direction to everyone else in a gaggle, it stops you exceeding VNE on a rough, thermally day.

But things are different when fear has got you. Fear as a master can destroy all the fun of flying. It can make you give up flying altogether simply on the basis of what might happen if you don’t.

"Oo-er! There’s another glider just joined my thermal. He’s only a thousand feet below me. I’m sure he’ll outclimb me. How can I be sure the pilot sees me? He’ll probably collide with me. I wonder if my parachute is reliable. How long since it was serviced and repacked? Maybe I should go and find another thermal. But I probably won’t find one and there aren’t any decent paddocks to land in. Maybe I should go fishing with my mate George.” … and so on.

How do we handle this kind of fear? First, we must recognise that it is part of our mental conditioning. To a certain extent, we fear because we choose to fear. Psychologists tell us that people usually fear the things they don’t understand, the things with which they are not familiar, not comfortable.

So one solution is to become familiar with the things that disturb us. When we become comfortable with them. We lose our fear of them.

When I first took up gliding I was fearful of stalling (I learned solo on primary gliders) but later when I graduated to flying Grunau Babies and Olympias I deliberately set myself the task of stalling whenever I had a safe height. Very soon I lost fear of stalling.

It was the same when I taught myself loops spins and other acrobatic manoeuvres. I have never had dual instruction in any of these, though I’ve had plenty of spin checks and passed every one. How do we learn to live comfortably with fear? When I was a young teenager, I asked an older man how I should handle fear. His answer was brief but sufficient. He said “Stand up tall, look it straight in the face and spit in its eye”.

A few years later I was a nervous young apprentice in my first job. An older lad caused me some trouble by trying to bully me and frighten me. After he’d tried it a few times I punched him on the nose. He never troubled me again.

The problem with fear is that it interferes with the process of thinking, either slowing it down or stopping it altogether. It’s when your thinking becomes clouded that your emergency turns into a catastrophe. As long as you keep thinking and acting on your thoughts you have some chance of survival, but when you stop thinking, you have not chance.

When you were learning to fly, your instructor undoubtedly told you to continue operating the controls during a landing run until the aircraft stopped rolling on the ground. “The flight is not over until the aircraft stops moving” the instructor would have said.

It’s the same with an emergency. Don’t stop flying the aircraft until the aircraft stops flying. While you have some control of the aircraft, be it ever so little, you have some chance of survival. If you panic, you have to hope. Keep thinking and it is likely you will keep living.

Now, to end this saga, let me tell you about the time I jumped from an aeroplane without a parachute and lived to tell the story.

There were two factors that contributed to my survival. Factor 1 was that I remembered the advice of an old parachute instructor and kept my knees bent as I landed.

Factor 2 was that, when I jumped from the aeroplane it was parked on the grass outside the hangar!

(Reproduced with permission from Australian Gliding Nov/Dec 1998)