Friday, January 11, 2013

Well this was a bit ridiculous

One could say this is not the expected sequence of events during - and following - a peaceful flight in your glider on a nice, sunny afternoon. Understatement of the year? One could say...


Pilots returned, one by one, to Bermuda High Soaring in Jefferson, S.C. By about 5 p.m. on July 26, 2012, the lift had died and everyone had returned to the gliderport—everyone except Robin Fleming. No one remembered hearing from Fleming since 1:30 or 2 p.m., and Jayne Ewing Reid, co-owner and chief tow pilot of the glider club and commercial operation, was worried. 
She called pilots who lived in the region and asked them to try to contact Fleming on their handheld radios. She flew the club’s Piper Pawnee in the direction of Fleming’s last known radio call, but found no evidence of the missing glider or its pilot. 
“This is when you get that feeling that something’s not right,” she said. Fleming always called if he landed out. Worried that something had happened to Fleming, an avid glider pilot and instructor at Bermuda High, Jayne Ewing Reid and business partner Frank Reid decided to file a missing airplane report. Neither suspected that Fleming was in trouble with the law. 
Fleming, 70, had been arrested for breach of peace after flying his Rolladen-Schneider LS8-18 sailplane noiselessly over the H.B. Robinson Nuclear Generating Station at an altitude of 1,518 feet msl - by his estimates, about 1,000 feet over the power plant’s dome - on his way to search for lift at nearby Lake Robinson.
Read the full article at AOPA Online.

2 comments:

  1. After watching this and reading more about it on AOPA I'm still sitting in front of the monitor with my jaw dropped. You just can't make this stuff up.

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    1. Yeah, I usually don't post much regulatory stuff on here. But sometimes it's so baffling/maddening it needs to be shared with the world!

      On a related note, AOPA followed up with the sheriff this week:
      http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2013/130117lessons-learned-from-glider-arrest.html

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