Geoff Loyns <>
sends this story about a former hang glider pilot flying sailplanes:

Our good friend was planning on a 1000 km triangle. It wasn't his
first 1000 km though. He's already done a couple. Few of us were sitting bored
on the ground after we got everybody launched. Suddenly we hear a very weird
noise coming from above. Tom was the only one to know what it was: flutter!. He
goes on the radio: "Who was passing just over the airport and fluttered?" ...
and then we hear: "It was me, I over sped and I'm having problems".


The next thing we see is a white piece falling from the sky. It felt down just
about 100 ft from us. First we thought it was "just" his wingtip. But no ... it
turned out to be the half of his horizontal stabilizer (!). Tom goes on the
radio again: "Just to let you know, you're missing the half of your horizontal.
What's you position and intentions?". No response.


These were the worst seconds, we couldn't identify him or his glider in the sky.
Maybe he already got out? Finally we see him turning final just above the runway
at a very high speed. Looks like he's gonna make it. He'll need the whole runway
though. He did. He stopped 100 ft of the runway end and it was over 6000 ft
runway.


So what happened?


He was just about to cross the start gate, diving for speed and to lose some
altitude while messing with his PDA. He got so involved that he forgot to check
the airspeed from time to time. After downloading the flight and making all the
calculations it turned out he exceeded the red line by 60 kts TAS (35 kts IAS)!


Nobody knows for sure but it looks like his spoilers got sucked out and caused
turbulence on his horizontal that induced the flutter and made it go off. At
first the glider started rolling in a roll but he was able to recover with
ailerons to level flight. He wanted to jump but then he figured that it's flying
pretty good above ca. 75 kts. He wasn't sure what else he could lose but decided
to try to land that thing. And he did.


He did a great job on hitting the runway and landing it. He was not using his
spoilers though - they were stuck out about 1/2 inch. He couldn't close them and
he didn't want to open them more not to cause more turbulence on the remaining
piece of his horizontal. So he landed without spoilers and with only a half of
the horizontal going down at about 80-75 kts.