Very difficult from the narrow perspective of the film to judge what happened and how our hero came to be in such a tight spot. The film probably starts at no more than 500 ft above the point of arrival, and it's quite possible that the writing was on the wall 5 minutes before the groundloop, as that's when the last likely looking fields might have been rejected in favour of a marginal glide that quickly turned to worms. Personally, I was interested in the reasonably large field disappearing to the port side of the nose some 15-20 seconds in to the video, but then you can't see likely negative factors like slope, wires etc, so again, difficult to judge. Let he who is without sin and all that, but a great vid to use as a reminder as to what happens when height and ideas evaporate simutlaneously. The irony is that he damn near got away with it. But for the fire hydrant or whatever it was, there might not have been a scratch on the glider at all....