"So there I was at 4000' and screaming along at 95 knots....." Should be great
Actually it was more like 25' at 45 knots.
And if this is too gay or too long for you (I've needed to write it down for my own purposes for a while now anyways...), then you can read this thread instead and mock me further:
http://www.airwarriors.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12506
I was slated to solo in the mighty Schweizer 2-33 sailplane (yeah, yeah, just bear with me), a pig of a plane if there ever was one. It was supposed to be three perfect patterns in a row, and then I'd solo. Simple enough?
The soaring club was winch launching that day. This means that the glider is at one end of the strip, and a big trailer (in our case) with spool of cable wired up to a car engine acts as a winch. Winch operator steps on the gas, and you shoot off, trying to gain as much altitude as you can until you are nearly on top of him, at which point you release the cable.
4000 feet of steel cable weighs a fair amount, and on the glider end there is a parachute system that deploys on release so the cable floats instead of crashing down. It is a tension system; strain on the cable from the glider's upward flight and the cable weighing down keeps the chute closed.
On my first launch, the chute (it was not the usual chute) ballooned up a little bit on one side, like it was going to squid, so I just pulled back harder on the stick, taking the slack out. The mishap occured on my second pattern flight. Winch takes the slack out, I call launch, and we're in the air. We're about twenty feet off the ground, and the chute gets a little funny. Again, I pull back, taking the slack out, except this time, the thing fvcking deploys and wraps over the canopy, crushing the pitot tubes.
I yanked the release, CFI took the plane. I figured he'd just set it down straight ahead; you could still estbalish a horizon by looking to the side. Instead, the chute shot off to the right and grabbed the main wheel, and the plane yaws right and pitches up a bit. We lose airspeed, controls go irresponsive. We flew wing first into the ground, and thankfully didn't stall out as I'd feared. Bird was cracked up pretty bad, but the occupants were fine. The mother who'd insisted on coming out to watch her baby solo was not.
Turns out what happened was I was supposed to have a simulated cable break on that pattern; winch operator thought the first little squid was our release, so he cut the power on the winch.
It was scary, but it really drove home in a visceral way for the first time how serious a business flying is, and motivated me to really get it right. We dragged out the other trainer, and I soloed later in the day.
