Lightning vs. Glider

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Hi just to say that I recently did a wing walk to celebrate my 50th birthday, 20 years after my gliding accident.
 
Wow!!! Congrats Mr Cooper. That is awesome.

To the others here - is it common practice for glider pilots to wear a chute when flying if not acro?
 
Terry M - 3CK (Chicago) said:
Wow!!! Congrats Mr Cooper. That is awesome.

To the others here - is it common practice for glider pilots to wear a chute when flying if not acro?
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Seems to depend on the glider. Some are designed for competition, not necessarily aerobatics, where parachutes may be required. Mid airs are a real possibility when thermalling with a lot of other aircraft. In some of those, the design is such that the parachute becomes the seat cushion. Quite a few members of my club wore them because of that.
 
Matthew said:
Seems to depend on the glider. Some are designed for competition, not necessarily aerobatics, where parachutes may be required. Mid airs are a real possibility when thermalling with a lot of other aircraft. In some of those, the design is such that the parachute becomes the seat cushion. Quite a few members of my club wore them because of that.
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Glider flying with a parachute is common practice back in Europe. In the US not so much, but it´s not uncommon. Gliders tend to converge to the best thermals, I´ve flown with 20+ gliders close together in a weak thermal, that´s not funny. The risk of collision is there. I know a guy and a girl who have one more take-off than landings and I´ve heard of many, many more, so wearing this parachute is very much mandatory to me when flying gliders.
Another risk is rigging the glider out of the trailer every day. Quite a few guys had to jump out after their winch launch because the elevator had not been attached properly. Most of these kind of accidents are fatal though.
 
Good to have you back, and posting.

More about lightning, from both a pilot and a Power company employee.

I have been sitting in my truck, eating lunch, when an ordinary utility pole was struck. It was straight ahead, about 50 feet away, and the top 5 feet simply exploded, several pieces landed on my hood, burning. That was a VERY small strike, but the up front and personal nature of it is at the top of my memory.

In a substation with a 400 foot microwave tower, a violent thunderstorm hit the tower 38 times in a little more than an hour, a wide mix of large and small energy strikes. The tower has a strike counter, the severity estimates are by the operators there. That is just a tiny part of my work experience with lightning.

At night, with a nearby thunderstorm, you can see the internal discharges light up the whole thunderhead, some weak others brilliant, displaying that a wide range of individual strikes occur.

If there are other storms around, there will be cloud to cloud strikes, often followed by cloud to ground strikes. Those are usually much higher energy as there was much greater difference of potential to bridge the distance.

Years ago, flying east, with a dissipating hurricane nearly gone over West Virginia, tops still at 38,000 feet, we were well north of the visible cloud, more than 20 miles. There were no overhanging clouds above us, but a minor thunderhead about 10 miles northeast of us. I had just announced "Well we are past the danger area" when a blinding bright stroke passed out in front of us, hurricane to small storm.

Even with an all metal Cessna 172, I have doubts whether we would have had a flying airplane if we had passed that bolt from wingtip to wingtip. At the power company, I have seen the welds, and vaporized gaps in metal equipment.

Perfectly legal VFR, but not safe to fly. With hindsight, I should have routed north of the small thunderstorm, since it was an isolated one.
 
I'm ready for Lightning vs. Gryder (and as I keep reading this topic)
 
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