The one thing I can see in the previous thread was the fact thatthe movement could have been extremely minute and only for a millisecond, and at the speed of which he was flying and altitude (really low) it made a difference. If he had been at 100 fee thigh on the back side of the circuit it would probably have looked like the wind bumped him or something. He would probably not even acknowledge it.
I do not see the fail safe as an absolute. Obviously there will have to be a small lapse in data for the fail safe to kick in. Perhaps that is what we were seeing with the apparent instaneous recovery, a combination of recovery to fail safe and or David's reflexes. We put too much emphasis on this fail safe feature for an item that comes along with a radio system that costs less than a thousand dollars to put together. I would hope that one properly set up would at least shut down my turbine prior to impact, if I am high enough, but at the speed and altitude of this crash it was pretty obvious that nothing much would have saved it. The discouraging part of this is the fact that no matter what precautions we take, some yahoo not paying attention could caused something much more signifcant than the loss of the plane, it could have taken someone's life. I do not blame the management of the field. I have been there and it is an awesome place and quite an experience, but it is just too damn big to control everything that is going on. Suppose some guy in a camper up there decides to reconfigure his trims on his plane before the next day and turns on his transmitter while a guy is down on the flight line flying 3D circuits with his large gas helicopter. If it goes into failsafe, I don't want to be around it when it goes wherever it is going. I know I sound like a "girlieman" here, but I think we are missing the forest for the trees. There is nothing we can do to prevent it using our most utilized technology at the present (72 Mhz), and there are issues with the new stuff as well (2.4). We are going to have to do a better job of being vigilant in and around the flying fields and events with radios and where we fly our aircraft. Over the past two years we have seen some pretty dramatic crashes and even some people killed, some of these by the noted best pilots in the world. Their machines were considered to be state of the art.
Tommy