I was specifically responding to this article, link provided in a long list of links to the same source of somewhat confused aviation “information” provided by Windy:
https://simpleflying.com/why-aircraft-take-off-land-into-wind/
If anyone here needs taking off into the wind explained, well…
Meanwhile, I’m not saying unmanned kite-planes should not utilize a circular takeoff. I have no specific opinion on that, but rather, as with most AWE “progress”, just waiting to see anything promising, besides promises of future progress.
I will say that, when you combine general aviation (which is the terminology used for small private planes), with sports like skydiving, hang-gliding, ultralights, light sport planes, gyrocopters, etc., I cannot ignore the overwhelming fatality rate. It seemed that maybe half the people we knew getting into hang gliding were dead or had been airlifted out, retrieved by ambulances, or driven to the hospital by fellow pilots, from crashes with severe injuries.
The example I gave of the four people dying in one crash was simply a single example. I looked up the statistics and found that skydiving had the worst record, followed closely by hang gliding, then general aviation (small planes). The dismal record of general aviation was the biggest surprise.
It seems that no accomplished pilot could possibly make the mistake of taking off downwind in a heavily loaded, freshly-fueled, light plane with 4 people onboard, but somehow, Joe apparently thought he could get away with it.
I took a ride in a powered hang glider (trike) at El Mirage Dry Lake, in view of where a gyrocopter pilot had lost his life a few weeks before.
Paraglider pilots are often severely injured when their canopy collapses, once in view of me and friends, standing above, ready to launch my hang glider. My launch was delayed, and next thing we knew, the fire trucks and ambulances were pulling in to pick up the pilot.
One HG pilot had a flight lasting 4 seconds before he had done a 180 and hit a tree at launch, due to high solar-thermic activity at the time. I found out while driving up to the same launch site.
Another female paraglider pilot died when she got drunk on her birthday and was doing stunts and went into a spin and crash in the desert chapparal below. She was on the phone with rescue people, but could not be found before she died.
Even just being a hang glider pilot seems risky - one very good HG pilot was driving drunk at night up near Big Bear and hit a tree, dying in the resulting fire. So it’s not just the sports themselves that are dangerous, but the people involved, and the poor decisions they sometimes make.
A friend who had over 2000 skydiving jumps had several friends die at once when they were thrown to the rear of an airplane with bench seats, causing an unrecoverable stall, which killed everyone on board. He got out of the sport “before the odds caught up to him”.
He was no dummy, and when he retired from aerospace, bought a couple of condos in Las Vegas and one in the Bahamas, where he was scuba diving with sharks. He stopped that after a lady on one of his dives had her foot bitten off. Within weeks, shark attacks happened to a couple of other ladies too in the same area! But they died.
![image](/uploads/default/original/2X/d/d3be7231c087b2817ec24bb1696d4008e5297936.jpeg)
Even though everyone in these sports knows safety is all about avoiding bad decisions, the people involved seem to be prone to risk-taking behavior and bad decision making.
Anyway, I did not create the doom and gloom over aviation, just couldn’t help but notice - when all your friends are hospitalized or dying from it!
Meanwhile, if you don’t know why airplanes like to take off and land into the wind, you don’t understand the ABC’s of flight! ![:slight_smile: :slight_smile:](/images/emoji/google/slight_smile.png?v=12)
VIDEO: Plane Explodes in a Massive Fireball After Crashing Near a Highway in Tennessee, Killing All (spreely.com)