Latest news June 7, 2006 Third day: joint session of the SDP and TSP The third day of OSTIVīs panel meetings consisted of a combined meeting of both the Training and Safety Panel (TSP) and the Sailplane Development Panel (SDP). The joint session was led by Michael Rehmet (SDP) and Ian Oldaker (TSP) and had approx. 35 people representing 13 different countries. The session began with a presentation by Petr Kousal dealing with a new cockpit damage accident reporting form. Collecting these data will be valuable for the improvement of cockpit crash worthiness. This form will soon be available on the OSTIV website. We then heard Mathias Borgmeier give a presentation on accident statistics. Not surprisingly, approximately half of all the reported accidents are stall/spin related. Appropriately, Loek Boermans, then repeated his presentation, which had been given earlier during the separate SDP session, on an improved stall-warning system.
After the break, Roland Stuck of the European Gliding Union (EGU) gave a presentation about recommendations made to the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) regarding rulemaking, glider certification, and operations and indicated those that have been accepted thus far.
After lunch, Francois Ragot spoke to the issue of standardizing some aspects of cockpit layouts and controls. This was followed by a talk by Franz van Autrebe dealing with the standardization of the layout of glider instrument panels. At this point accidents that have occurred due to improper rigging, but which were not visually apparent, were discussed, as were potential remedies to this problem.
After the afternoon break, a discussion of increasing the required landing approach angle form 1:7 to 1:5 took place. Finally, lifetime limits of sailplane airframes were briefly considered, as were some issues concerning the maximum allowable strengths of weak links used for aero towing.
The next meeting of the panels will be a joint one, and is set for September-October, 2007 timeframe.
