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The crash
It was a nice flying day in Kutztown, PA. Here's Mom with the glider prior to Dad's unfortunate mishap. I happened to have my camera on hand. As Dad came in for his landing I saw that something was amiss ...
... he came in low due to a downdraft and had to come in under some power lines, which would have been all right except that he noticed that a road sign was going to clip his wing, so he tried banking a bit to avoid it and the wing grabbed the ground (there was a road at the end of the runway) ... he hit the road and ground looped onto the end of the field in a cloud of dust. It was not pretty.
Dad extricated himself from the cockpit slowly ... nothing was broken except his spirit. We draggen the broken bird home and Dad spent a week sulking and nursing his wounds in bed, understandably. During that time he hatched a plan for what to do about it. Nothing kept Dad down for very long.
The whole fuselage was twisted and damaged beyond repair. Here's the tail end. Dad's entry in sailplane's log book: 8/8/65 "Fuselage damaged extensively during violent groundloop on the edge of Kutztown Airport, PA. (obstacle avoidance)" This was after just 16 hours of flight time and 20 starts.
Dad wrote on the back.:
"It is crunched and wrinkled, but at least it is in one piece. Good thing it wasn't a wooden airplane!"
Dad wrote (in Swedish): "There was nothing that hit against the fuselage, just the landing wheel which impacted with uneven ground surfaces quite forcibly and the momentum weight of the long heavy wings ... it was just too much for the sheet metal skin to take."