It is really tragic when a death occurs that could have so easily been avoided. I was stunned to read about Bill's death and remembered how much fun he was at the Pulpit fly-in. He was obviously loving life.
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In any case, I make it a point on mountain launches (especially) to hook in before moving to launch.
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Whitwell reminded me of Zirks except the LZ glide is much greater. Not a forgiving place to launch unhooked.
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Christy
(If you potato long enough on launch, is someone?bound to notice if you happened to be unhooked?)
Christy asked that if you potatoed the launch long enough would not someone be bound to notice that you were not hooked in.
I think one of the reasons people don't notice is that we often have black harnesses. The black riser mains are not very visible. I thought Dave Proctor had a good idea: Get Steve W to make some flourescent orange velcro chute line covers to replace the black ones.
Steve hit on a possible contributing factor to Bill's accident. In our exhaustive discussions afterwards, the fact surfaced that Bill had a Wills Wing glider (with the characteristic short, white hang loops), and a High Energy harness. I don't know if this is true of all High Energy harnesses...but Bill's harness had short mains. So he had installed a 12" long (or longer) extension loop that was black.
The end result was that, at a glance, even when Bill was not hooked in, an observer would have seen a long black strap running from his harness up to his white WW hang loop...and possibly interpreted this as him being hooked in (because this is how most WW harnesses look when hooked in).
Again, this is just a possible contributing factor---not the sole cause.
Regardless, just knowing this makes me second Steve's suggestion---that making harness mains flourescent orange (or some bright color) could help. I also think that any harness in which the carabiner is more than a few inches below the keel (in other words, in plain sight) is a bad idea. Not technically, but visually. A pilot's carabiner---when hooked in---should be easy to see at a glance from any angle. Bill's wasn't.
Need a carabiner with audible high pitch tone when not secured in area of glider. Like a transponder with different codes so that all the gliders don't sound. 9v battery?
