Flipping once or twice
The story
here.
At this point the air started getting rowdy. I headed out over the
valley to get away from any rotor potential from the hill. About half way to
Larry's the Atos pitched down and then up violently. Everything went quite and
the wing hit me in the back. It flipped over forward leaving me on top o the
wing flying backwards. At this point I considered pulling my reserve, but I was at fourteen and figured
I would try to straighten it out. I crawled to the nose to try to get the glider
to flip back over forward Instead of backward. It worked, but when I got back
under the glider I realized my control frame had collapsed. With nothing to hang
onto the glider continued to dive. Eventually it started to climb and went into a loop. The first loop was fine,
but as energy ran out the second loop left me stalled upside down and laying on
the wing again. During this time I was able to get a hold of the control wires,
giving me enough pitch control to level the glider out. The air kicked me about
for a little longer before thing settled. Now with calmer air and the glider level I started working to get the control
frame bent back into a useable configuration. The beauty of the Atos is the
control wires. I had those for turning and the upper part of the down tubes for
pitch. I still had plenty of altitude to get used to flying this way. My flap cord got pinned in the bent down tube so I picked a large uphill field
to put her down. It was still blowing around 15 out of the north, so I had a
nice head wind to land in. All in all one of my best landings. My vario recorded
6667 down on the 1 second averager.
http://OzReport.com/1275915081
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