Accident Report

Hi, All. Hope you are all well. Here’s where I am. Transferred home yesterday after 10 days and glad to be here. Can totter around with backbrace and walker. Sitting for 5 minutes has me sweating and white as a ghost. (no change there!) No movement without the brace on for few weeks to come. Moderate pain controlled by medication. Feel as stiff as Mr. Burns after a hard day beating on Homer but life is increasingly rosy. Torn muscles in left arm coming along.
      Prognosis seems good for full recovery, due in no small measure to the support and love and help of so many people, who visited, phoned, lifted, carried, dressed, bathed, brought gifts, and showed so much care and concern which was so uplifting and really helped me keep positive. Its a true privilege to be part of this very special family.

Accident Report
Wednesday 5th February. 2002

Broke a safe flight streak just 8 flights shorts of getting my first Diamond Safety Award. Doh. Launched at 3.30, was getting to 6 or so in nice climbs and playing around over Marshall. Although this was my second flight on the wing I was flying, (a large) I had spent a lot of time on the medium size of the same wing and felt confident enough to throw down some stalls and SAT’s high over Marshall peak.
      Felt happy and at home on the wing. Toplanded Marshall, then relaunched and spent another 20-30 minuted working moderate ift over Cloud, enjoying the sink rate advantage of being underweight on the wing. ( I have been spending a fair amount of time on different wings and sizes while waiting for my new wing for the season. This changing around is a risk factor that I should have been allowing for, but didn’t sufficiently do so) At 4.30 I flew out over from Cloud with about 4500 feet. It was still plenty soarable but I like to save some altitude to play with over the LZ.
      Aerobatics are not for everybody but I personally enjoy the flow and the beautiful feel and dynamics of a nice routine and I feel it makes for a better understanding of the wings we fly. But with this opportunity for extra fun and learning comes the absolute need for discipline, self-control, rules and preparation. I badly let myself and everybody else down on several of these counts. I got over the LZ with perhaps 2000 feet of vertical clearance. I dropped into a slow right hand SAT, held it and got it to slow nicely. Airwave gliders all do the SAT beautifully and the fact that I was underweight didn’t seem to be an issue. After a clean exit, I pulled in a spin for a few turns, slowed the outside wing and exited with a stall. Again, all seemed good, I was in a nice flow and feeling at one with the wing.
      What I did next really takes the cake for stupidity: Some background for those not familiar with the SAT “revolution.” By now pretty much everyone has seen the SAT. One of its beauties is that the dynamics of the maneuver opens itself up to a rich and wide range of variations, including the biggest and baddest move of them all- Tumbling.
      The basic move, the vanilla flavor of SAT variations, is the basic spiral entry SAT, where the pilot drops the wing down to one side into the beginnings of spiral, and uses the sliding action of the wing to throw the top wing down and through such that the pilot flies backwards, and controls the wing with the high-side brake. Feels great, and the recovery is very simple.
      Another entry/variation is the assymetric entry SAT. The pilot makes a high speed turn such as the dropping section of an assymetric spiral and once he has passed the bottom portion, throws SAT posture and SAT’s in the same direction as the spiral. Plenty of energy is needed to avoid spinning because you are using huge brake amplitude. The top wing drops through and the pilot gets a SAT that is quite a bit more dynamic, with cycling brake pressure and Rotation on a more vertical “over-and-under” plane (because of the diving and climbing movement of the pilot) than the ordinary “round-and round” SAT.
      The medium size wing did the dynamic SAT really nicely, and so with perhaps 500 feet over the LZ, I let the wing dive from the stall, did a hard right turn and set up posture for an asymmetric SAT. Bad choice. With the large wing being way too big, I simply didn’t have the energy to carry into the maneuever in order to stay way from the wingtips. To cap it all off, my timing on this occasion was terrible.
      As I threw on the extra brake I climbed straight towards to outside wingtip, which folded and came straight down through the lines. I was at the height of the wing and already in bad cravatte configuration, so you can imagine the strength of the spiral once I swung through. From level flight you have some way to control the turn, but not in this instance. Heinous lefthand spiral ensued, with very heavy G-loading. I thought about ESP’ing the wing (spinning towards the cravated side to free the tuck) but realized that I didn’t really have the height to be sure about doing so in time and dealing with the spin/stall plus recovery.
      In any event, I was over flat ground and the reserve seemed like the best choice. So I reached for my right shoulder mount with my right hand, but the G’s were way too strong. Much stronger than even a locked spiral dive, given extra sickening energy by my fall down into the cravatte. So I reached with both arms over and wrenched with all my strength (this is when I tore the muscles in my left arm) and got the reserve out at 90 degrees to my body.
       This is when I kept expecting things to get better. No such luck. The wing was whipping around so hard that it caught up with the reserve, which was slow in opening and as I looked up was between the centre lines, and nowhere near inflated. Oh shit. Time to ESP: yank the inside brake and at least slow the descent rate and come in backwards on my protection instead of spiralling forward as was now. Remember trying to reach back up for the brakes but think that I wasn’t able to because of the G-forces. About now the ground started to feel super close, bushes started crashing and I piledrived into a smallish bush that saved my life.
      Didn’t see my life flash before me but I did think “Oh, shit- I’ve gone and wasted so much, the rest of my life, my girl, my friends, my flying...” My spine felt like it was buried tight inside a block of concrete but there was some huge relief when I felt my toes wiggle. Expert assistance and co-ordination by the poor folks the LZ who had to watch this stupid and selfish display. To traumatize the people I care most about just because I didn’t have the discipline to observe the basic rules that I should have set for myself, to get carried away in the flow of what I was doing without stopping for a moment to think, were really unforgiveable and I was underservedly lucky to be walking around.

• Too low
• Too light
• Didn’t stop to think and set sensible limits
• Relying on parachute technology which is never 100%

     I really set myself many goals for this season that I am now going to miss. I hope that I can get back pychologically to point where I can compete, trust the reserve, as I feel this may be the biggest challenge in getting back to where I want to be. But I truth I don’t think I’ll ever get fully back on that track simply because to do so requires giving 100%, to go hard and fast and risk injury. I simply can’t risk hurting myself that way again.
      First off, the inside of my lower back looks like a scaffolded construction site. I’ll continue to love flying, slowly competing and carving, but I can’t hit in again without certain paralysis or worse.
      Second off, I know the sheer pain, how bad it really does suck to have a team of surgeons work for 8 hours on a single vertebra. I can’t put myself or especially those around me through that pain because we now know how bad it really feels.
      Until you’ve been through it, you just don’t. I’m missing weeks of work and months of flying, and its really is 95% my fault. I feel like I have let a lot of people down. Sorry guys. If anything positive has come of this its the re-enforcement in my mind that there are some very special people who go to the mountains to fly, and I want to be around them as long as I can.

-Matthew Carter

PS: If you are going to do them as doubtless people will, pick your height bands for maneuvers, based on height needed for recovery and predictability.

• Up high, funky SAT's, loops, and spins.
• Moderate height- regular SAT's, wingovers and assymetric spirals.
• Down low- less than 500 feet- nothing except for moderately tight turns.
• Less than 100 feet- mellow downwind base, final.

Had I observed these rules instead of stupidly reversing(!!) them I might be still enjoying this stuff. The problem being that confidence increases through a routine when to observe these height bands requires either that confidence fall, or that maturity keep things in check. I failed on both counts.