⌐ AV8OR WANNABE

I am not sure myself but what I was primarily talking about was the actual landing more than the gliding part which frankly is pretty straight forward; you're going down no matter what, you need to make sure you don't get too slow and have to decide where you're going to put it down and stick to your decision.

Glider pilots are used to "milking” the airplane down onto sometimes pretty rough grass strips, etc. where touching down gently is very important.

Also, we are always focused on keeping the wings straight during the touchdown as the go-around option obviously just isn’t out there...

So basically I think the fact the river was to his left and he was already in a shallow left turn gave him a pretty good view of his touch down zone options. That's what I'd be looking out for and I'm sure his glider pilot instinct kicked in too.

By the way, I am not implying that a non-glider pilot wouldn't be able to repeat what he did, quite the opposite.

I simply think that as a glider pilot he truly knew how critical it’d be to keep those wings very straight over the water because in his past I’m sure he’d witnessed a ground-loop or two when the wing would dip just a tad too low over the grass strip... That's all.

Either way, like I said, very nice touchdown or splashdown indeed..,