Roger's Soaring Blog

Motion-induced blindness

2012-01-19T21:33:00.000-08:00

A friend shared this link and I think it's worth sharing here as well. We're taught as student pilots that when we're scanning for traffic, we need to look at different sections of the sky for short periods and not fixate. The reason has more to do with our optic system architecture than with our conscious ability to recognize objects. The brain does many things for us automatically at levels below our awareness, and it does not do all of them well! Try this on-line experiment. If you look at the yellow dots you can see that the demo is honest - the dots are there the whole time. If you fixate on the central dot the yellow dots will disappear. This is not the classic optic nerve blind spot demo - this is more about the neural networks that perform pattern recognition. If you shift your gaze slightly, the dots will reappear. So to compensate for this effect in real life - to spot air traffic - it's essential to shift your gaze frequently.

Review of 2011

2012-01-16T19:25:00.000-08:00

2011 was quite an interesting year. It started off badly, but I had some terrific flights and gave some great passenger rides. It ended with our club returning to Hemet-Ryan airport on a limited basis.

I had a total of 24 flights, four less than in 2010, but 18 hours and 12 minutes, which is more time.

Six flights with instructors
Two flights with other private glider pilots
Six passenger flights
Ten solo flights
No cross-country flights
Six winch launches - the most I've had in any year so far
16 flights in the Grob 103
8 flights in the PW5
Two flights over two hours each
Four flights between one and two hours each

I only flew at Crystalaire and Hemet-Ryan this year. Our club did not take any field trips.

16:44 at Crystal
1:28 at Hemet

I flew at least once every month except August, and that was because my family took a 3-week vacation.

Early in the year I had to put my plans to get my Commercial and Instructor ratings on hold. It became apparent that I needed a lot more practice in the Grob 103 if I was to have the accuracy I needed to take the practical tests, and due to a variety of family needs I was not able to accomplish that before my written tests expired. With our club training program on hold due to the Hemet and Blanik situations, I would not have much opportunity to instruct anyway, so the cost of restarting the process did not seem worthwhile. Now that we are planning to fly regularly at Hemet, I may resume my training and testing in 2012.

At Crystalaire, I had some really interesting flights. The north-facing mountain terrain makes it possible to soar even when the weather is doing some wacky things. I found mountain wave lift several times and learned to recognize and work it. I explored what I called "mountain wake" lift and wrote a lengthy article about it, which got some attention among the pilots at Crystal. I didn't do the kind of really high mountain wave flights that some others have done, but I did get up to 12.2 and 12.6 thousand feet a couple of times - pretty exciting. I'm looking forward to moving our club ships back to Hemet because it is closer to home (less driving), and in some ways the thermal lift is more consistent, but I'm going to miss the challenge of the mountains - I learned a lot there! And I never did get to the top of Mt. Baldy…

In the spring and summer I took my cousins and some friends for flights. We found thermal and wave lift, gaggled with other gliders, and had a great time.

The club continued to face challenges in 2011:

The Blanik grounding situation continues to be unresolved, putting a damper on our student training program.
One of our two Blaniks was damaged in a storm at Lake Elsinore, and was totaled by the insurance company.
Although the FAA ruled in our favor in the Hemet-Ryan situation, the process of establishing operating rules and negotiating a reasonable fee structure with the County of Riverside has been painful. Operating there is laborious and inconvenient until we get tiedowns, storage, and facilities on the north side of the airport near runway 4-22.

The Winch is Back

2011-12-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

After several successful weekends of aerotowing at Hemet-Ryan Airport, we decided it was time to start some winch launching. The tow pilot we've been engaging was not available this weekend, and it was probably the last weekend before everyone gets really busy with the holidays. Some of our members had late afternoon commitments, so we knew it would be a short day, but that's OK - we really just wanted to run through our procedures and see how things worked out. The weather was forecast to be mostly clear, cool with light winds.

We knew that there was possibly a problem with our cable, because we'd had several breaks last time we used the winch. Although the Spectra cable is very strong, it can get worn and damaged. We can see some worn spots in the cable, and we have a couple of theories about what caused it:

One time a fairly large loop of cable developed along one side of the spool, i.e. the cable had a bit of slack when the spool went around. The cable that was then laid down alongside that loop could have rubbed against it and worn it down in the area of that loop. The loop was temporary, and removed itself the next time the cable was pulled out, and as far as I know it has not happened again.
The cable was worn by dragging over a peak in the middle of the runway where we operated for a few weeks. Usually a cable does not get a lot of wear, because it's pulled out slowly, and when it's pulled in quickly for launching, it's not on the ground very long - the rising glider lifts it up. But this particular runway has a noticeable hump in the middle. For the first few seconds of the pull, one section of the cable is subjected to quite a bit of friction. On a flat runway, the ground friction would be fairly evenly distributed along the length of the cable. With a hump, it's like dragging the cable over a corner.

We'll probably never know exactly what caused the wear, but we are expecting more breaks until all the weak areas are spliced. We may reverse the cable on the spool, if the worn area is toward one end. If the runway is not too long, the worn section may remain on the spool.

One of the nice things about the FAA's ruling in our complaint against the County is that it explicitly provides for winch operations. As long as we are following standard radio procedures and the operating manual that we and the County developed, winch launching from the glider runway (4/22) can coexist with power traffic. We can even announce a two-minute pause in power traffic if necessary.

But before we could safely launch, we needed to work on the field. The County has allowed a lot of weeds, mostly tumbleweeds, to grow on the north side of the airport. Many of them are close enough to the runway to be a hazard - last weekend one pilot had a wingtip go through a tw as he was slowing down after landing - it was enough to divert him off the runway a bit, but fortunately he was not going very fast and got it back under control. One of our club members provided a "drag", essentially a length of heavy railroad rail on chains, pulled behind his vehicle. This did a great job of cutting off the tumbleweeds (which are designed to break off at ground level), and did a partial job of clearing them out of the way. I raked many of them out of the way, and we then had enough clear areas for takeoff and landing. If we get a good west wind, it might clear them all completely out of the way. But if we get a north or south wind, we'll need to rake them out of the way again. The County needs to take care of this!

Eventually we were all set up and one of our instructors took the Grob up for the first winch launch, taking off on runway 22 to the west, and landing on 4 to the east. He got up to about 1,000' AGL before the line back-released. There was essentially no wind, so that was a pretty good altitude. A headwind helps the glider climb faster, getting to a higher altitude before topping out over the winch.

He and I went up next, me flying as PIC from the back seat. One disadvantage to the back seat is that you can't see the rope at all - not that you can very well from the front either. The launch and climb were normal, if maybe a bit slower than we might like. We were up at about 800' AGL when I sensed that we lost the rope. He said it hadn't back-released, so we concluded it was a rope break. But we were in lift! We climbed 200' right away without doing anything. In the slippery Grob, 800' is a decent pattern entry altitude, and we were just over the end of the runway, so we actually had a about 300' or more of altitude to use to explore just a little. There was a bit of lift in the area, just enough to take us up to 1,100' AGL and keep us aloft for a few minutes. The thermal was hard to center - I got lift on one side of the circle and zero sink on the other side.

Soon we came back to land on 4. Other than slightly overshooting my final turn, my landing and rollout were great. Since we had the whole length of the runway, I did a smooth "wheel" landing, closed up the spoilers, and rolled all the way back to the starting point.

Unfortunately, that was the last flight of the day. Finding and untangling the cable, and repairing the break, would consume the rest of the time we had available (remember some guys needed to make it a short day). For the next winch launch day, we plan to reverse the line on the spool.

Winds of Change at Hemet-Ryan

2011-12-03T19:51:00.001-08:00

The gliders have returned to Hemet! I've been too busy to blog lately, so I'll catch up now. Orange County Soaring and Cypress Soaring have begun joint operations. This was our third week of aerotowing, and my second week of flying. A couple weeks ago there was not much lift, and I only got a 23-minute flight in some convergence.

This week the weather was... interesting. The forecasts disagreed as to whether there would be thermal lift and how high it would go. We're experiencing a "cold Santa Ana" condition, in which high pressure in the deserts causes high winds in the basins and valleys. Such winds usually bypass the Hemet valley, but if they do hit it they can tear apart all the thermals, and usually don't cause much usable wave. (At least that's how it seemed to me... two years ago at Hemet I had no real wave experience, so maybe I just didn't know how to recognize and exploit it.) As the air comes through the Cajon pass it is compressed and warms up, but it was obvious that it was not dry as it often is. As I was driving to the airport, I could see the air downwind from the pass condensing into turbulent clouds, which got bigger and bigger as they went south. Most of the clouds hugged the Mt. San Jacinto area, though, and the Hemet valley was mostly clear. The clouds that did appear in the valley looked like rotor, so maybe the wave would work?

Some of the Cypress guys got to flying earlier than we did, and got to over 10,000 feet over the lake! They seemed to think it was thermal lift.

I took off in the PW5 about 1:00 and found some workable lift right away. It was turbulent but broad, big enough to circle in, but not terribly strong. The highest lift I saw on the ship's digital display was 3.2 knots, but the vario was not working right and I think it was quite a bit stronger. My clip-on electronic vario was often going crazy, so I think the lift may have been in the 6-8 knot range at times. But it didn't go very high: my max altitude was 5200' MSL.

T and M in the club's Grob 103 and I thermalled together for a while, and I took a few pictures. The Cypress PW6 also thermalled with me, but they were higher and I couldn't get any pictures.

The lift was never smooth, so I never encountered wave action. It seemed to be all thermal, which was surprising with the strong wind. But the temperature differential was substantial, so I guess it was strong enough to punch up through the wind. At one point I was about 3,000 to 3,500 MSL, and the outside air temp was 18 degrees lower than the AWOS was reporting at 1,500 MSL. I came back after an hour so G could have the glider. The lift was still working - I just sped up to create extra drag.

Historical Trends in Sailplane Activity at Hemet-Ryan Airport

2011-11-27T23:37:00.001-08:00

In support of our negotiations with the County of Riverside regarding soaring at Hemet-Ryan Airport, I have conducted a study of the number of sailplanes based there from 1996 through 2009. The source of data for the study was historical images from Google Earth: I counted the gliders, hangars, and trailers in each image and did some analysis and graphs. The study is available here.

Dual Flight over Early Snow

2011-11-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

Friday brought a fast-moving cold storm to Southern California. Saturday looked to be clear skies and cool aloft with possible thermals to 9 or 10,000 feet, but also possibly windy to 15 knots, with the wind maybe too westerly to make good wave. As I was driving to the airport another pilot called and we talked about sharing a flight, so I prepped our Grob 103. It's the better ship to be in if the winds get strong, but its oxygen tank is out for repair, so I knew we couldn't go too high if the wave was working. We needed to do several items of maintenance, but that gave us some time to get early flight reports from a couple of other pilots. It sounded like a high tow over the mountains might be the only way to fly today, so I was glad to be splitting the tow fee.

There were lenticular clouds to the north, but way too far away to be useful... that's common at Crystal.

The wind was from the west but not very strong, 5 knots most of the time. There was obviously a gentle south wind coming over the mountains, pushing clouds over the rim into the desert as you can see in the picture. And we were told there was an east wind aloft, so ridge lift on the east side of Mt. Lewis was a possibility. And with the clear air, thermals might pop too. So... the air was in a lot of motion today - what would we find?

I took the rear seat, and G as PIC took the front. He said he had not had much experience with wave or ridge soaring, so he thought maybe I'd do much of the flying and he'd to the takeoff and landing. Fine with me. I took myPDA/GPS device hoping to get a trace of our flight. As we were pushing out to the runway, a cigar-shaped lenticular cloud formed right between us and the mountain, so smooth wave was happening. But by the time we took off, it was gone.

Another pilot reported that the rumored ridge lift on Mt. Lewis was not working, and the spillover clouds were really getting thick, so we let off at 8500' kind of in front of the mountain and went looking for ridge lift in various places. G didn't find anything so after a while he turned it over to me. I had seen some raggedy little clouds in a rough SW-NE line that I thought might be weak rotor clouds, but there was no real lift next to them.

So on the theory that the west wind might be making ridge lift or weak wave, I tried a north-south line over the low end of the Second Ridge. I did find some narrow lift and was able to work up in it through several back-and-forth passes. I tried to keep my lines tight in case it was a narrow band, and that seemed to work. The picture (click to expand) shows a trace of that portion of the flight. It was not smooth enough to be wave, and there was no obvious north-south ridge to be making orographic lift, so what was it? I thought maybe the nose of the Second Ridge was creating what they call "bow wave", but the wind wasn't really strong enough for that. It didn't last long, but I gained 1,000', so we had time to fly around.

Didn't find much after that, and eventually got low enough over the ridges that I decided to head toward a weak little lenticular could that was perched over the airport. I found neither good lift nor good sink on the way, and by the time we got there the lennie had disappeared. I gave the plane back to G and he went in search of thermal lift on the way back to the landing pattern. There may have been a little, but it was pretty weak and not working.

There were a few other odd little lennies to the west, but too far for us to reach. We came in for a landing after 51 minutes. The surface wind was still from the west and only about 5 knots, so it had never really picked up.

We had seen a glider above us and later below us when we were working the one area of mysterious lift. Back on the ground, instructor D asked, if that was us he saw, and commented that the shear line had been good but had disappeared as we worked it. Then the light went on! The wind from the south over the mountain, and the wind from the west, were colliding and going up. It wasn't ridge, or wave, or "bow wave", or thermal - it was convergence! I'm gonna need a checklist just for all the different kinds of lift we find in the chaotic environment over the mountains!

Hemet-Ryan Master Plan Includes Soaring - NOT!

2011-10-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

The County of Riverside published their new Master Plan, along with an "Initial Study" that addresses environmental and other issues. The Plan is full of unsubstantiated assumptions, unsupported conclusions, and undisclosed motivations. It assumes soaring will come back but will fail... it states that the Cal Fire operation will move and obliterate the soaring space but admits this will not help Cal Fire... it states this is necessary to provide "opportunities for new aviation uses on the south side" but doesn't say what those might be, and it admits that growth at HMT will be minimal.

In other words, it's a sham. FAA forced them to update their plan, and they did so with no input from soaring. Although they state that HMT is primarily a recreational airport, they plan to shut out a segment of aviation that accounts for a large fraction of the recreational operations. FAA ruled their actions illegal... but they persist in being uncooperative.

Here are links to the Plan and the Study.

If you'd like to write to the County about this issue, you can find the address and a sample letter on the Save Soaring at Hemet Today site.

It's Complicated

2011-10-05T23:23:00.000-07:00

The wind was from the south and there was enough moisture in the air that cumulus was a possibility, with cloudbase at 10,000 to maybe 13,000 feet, but little chance of overdevelopment into thunderstorms. One of the very experienced instructors came back from an early flight, so we asked him what it was like up there. He said, "Confusing, but there's lift everywhere." Now, if THIS guy thinks it's confusing, you know it'll be a challenge for low-time pilots like me.

The soaring textbooks show simple, idealized diagrams of thermals, ridge (orographic) lift, and wave lift. In the real world, It's Complicated. Those types of airflows intersect, interact, and interfere with each other. Figuring out exactly what's going on can be, as he said, Confusing. Why worry about what kind of lift it is, why not just fly in it? Well, in thermal, you typically circle. In ridge, you go back and forth following the contour of the ridge, in the "sweet spot" above and maybe a little downwind from it. In wave, you go back and forth in a (possibly long) vertical zone, or sometimes fly directly into the wind. So... if you guess wrong about the type of lift you're in, you're likely to fly in the wrong direction, and right out of the lift.

From the ground, I saw the mountain peaks (9,000 and 10,000 feet tall) creating an expanding trail of cumulus clouds. But the clouds didn't start above the peaks, they started downwind of the peaks, and at about the same level. So they did not act like classic orographic CU. This picture kind of shows it but not too clearly - the clouds spawned from the left and grew larger to the right, out of the frame:

Here's a sketch of how it would have looked from the side:

And from above:

Once in the air, I found lift under each of these "wakes" of clouds. What kind of lift? It was wide enough to circle in, like thermal, and strong: I gained 5,000' in no time. But it was windy, which usually tears apart thermals. It was downwind of the peaks, like wave... but it was not smooth, and the clouds were puffy like CU, not smooth lenticulars. And it was downwind of the peaks, not starting over it as ridge lift would be. So... it was something else. I came to think of it as "wake" lift, triggered by the peaks like wave, going down and then up like wave, but turbulent enough to make puffy CU instead of smooth lennies. And in front of the leading point of each "wake", there were clouds that were NOT rising and puffy, but rather ragged and rotating: rotor cloud as you would see below a wave:

Imagine three rocks in a stream. They make V-shaped wakes which go up and then down and then up, and get turbulent downstream. And if the rocks are close enough, the wakes start interacting. Remember "constructive interference" from physics? The wakes can constructively interfere and the lift can add up to be stronger and higher than the wakes. And that is just what I found. Where the V-shaped cloud streets started to come together, I saw a small, smooth lennie! Right in the middle of this picture, you can see the smooth, rounded, fuzzy leading edge of it. The CU in the lower left is in one of the wakes, and there were other CU's directly behind me.

The lennies were wedged between the wakes as shown in the next sketch. The wakes eventually merged into a solid mass of CU.

I got up to cloudbase under a wake, then left the wake and approached the leading edge of the lennie, hoping to find smooth wave lift, and I did. (That's the first time I have actually been close enough to approach a wave cloud and find the lift. Up to now, my experience with wave lift has been in clear air.) The wave lift was pretty narrow, and I could not move very far without getting out of it, but it did take me up above the CU cloudbase, which is pretty rare. In this next pic, you can see the edge of the lennie again, and look downward at the base of the CU:

I went as high as possible under the leading point of a wake, and then tried to hop to the peak that was triggering it, but that was directly upwind. The cloudbase was about 2,500 feet higher than the peak, but since I had to fly upwind that was barely enough to get to the peak with a safe margin of altitude. I was able to overfly Mt. Baden-Powell, but not Mt. Baldy.

Confusing and complicated - but enlightening! I did not go far, I went all around the airport trying to visualize what the air was doing, trying out and verifying theories. Sure enough, there was lift everywhere, and the corresponding sink was not very strong. I easily stayed up for two and a half hours. Unfortunately my flight recorder malfunctioned so I don't have a flight trace, but I did get some pretty good pictures of these interesting situations.

Wishing to soar

2011-09-10T21:37:00.001-07:00

Regular readers may have noticed that I did not post anything in August. That's because I was traveling, mostly on a family "road trip" vacation to the midwest. Using the SSA's list of soaring sites, I looked for commercial ops along our route so I could get in some soaring at a remote site. I mostly found clubs, and as you may know it's not very practical for a visiting private pilot to fly with a club, for reasons of logistics and insurance.

The only viable option I could find was Durango Soaring Club in Colorado. It's a club, not a commercial op, and their web site indicated that their focus is on selling rides and some instruction. It did not look like they rent gliders, and I've heard that the checkout at Durango is pretty extensive because of the challenging terrain. The only option looked to be to pay for a tourist ride and maybe get to do some of the flying, but that seemed expensive and unsatisfying. My schedule was uncertain enough (and the purpose of the trip was to do things with my family), so I didn't really look into it seriously.

Click the pic for a larger image.

While in Durango, our main purpose (well, mine anyway) was to ride the Durango and Silverton Narrow-Gauge Railway. This is a spectacular ride in 1880's rail cars, with 1930's coal-burning steam engines, though the beautiful and rugged Animas Gorge through the Rocky Mountains.

Well, guess what: the tracks go right by Durango Soaring Club. And just as we steamed by, a Blanik came in to land on their beautiful grass strip, and we happened to be on the right side of the train. So here are a couple of my best shots.

Click the pic for a larger image.

Wish the fields I fly from had grass like this!

And that's as close as I came to soaring in August.

Thermal flight - shoulda, coulda, woulda

2011-09-10T21:13:00.000-07:00

Labor Day weekend had great weather for thermal soaring at Crystal. It got up to about 97F.The forecast was for thermals to 15K-18K, and there was a little moisture in the air which meant there was a possibility of cumulus clouds at about 14K. After dealing with some maintenance issues, I took off in the PW5 about 1:30. We really climbed fast on tow, and by the time we got to the First Ridge we were already at 2500 AGL and flying through thermals. I thought I'd be smart, save a little on the tow, and let off in a good thermal instead of towing up into the mountains. I let off with the vario nearly pegged, but when I tried to get into it I could find no lift. No sink, but no lift either. I worked little bits of lift near the golf course and the wash (not known to be great sources) and could not seem to climb, and could not get away from the airport. At one point I got down to about 1500 AGL and was thinking about landing to take another, higher tow, but I stuck it out and finally found a decent thermal. There was a significant wind from the west, and I had to hunt upwind to stay in it. Finally it really started to cook, and I got up to about 9,000 MSL (5,600 AGL). That enabled me to head into the mountains and work the Second Ridge.

In the mountains I found thermal lift and some lift that seemed to be ridge. At least one glider was visible thousands of feet above me, working up near the base of one of the few CU's within striking distance. Eventually I got up to about 11,000 MSL and headed deeper into the mountains. I've had a goal of reaching the top of Mt. Baldy, which several of our club pilots have already done (and some did that day). But I had wasted a *lot* of time scratching in that first thermal, and I knew that G was waiting for his turn in the glider after me. So I had to turn back a few miles short of Baldy. As I headed back west I continued to go up, and reached 12,000 MSL quite easily. I could have gone up to probably 14K if I had had more time, but I stopped at 12K and headed back.

Since I was now over the desert at over 11,000 feet, I headed northeast and overflew a private airport known as Gray Butte, and still got back to Crystal with thousands of feet to lose. After pulling spoilers to lose altitude more quickly, I landed after a total of an hour and 24 minutes. My altitude gain was 6,100 feet. I recorded the flight on my GPS/PDA but have not had time this week to upload and analyze it.

I shoulda held on to the tow instead of letting off early and wasting at least a half hour hunting the first good thermal. Then I woulda had more time at high altitude and coulda reached Mt. Baldy. So that goal is still in the future...

Nice Thermal Passenger Flight at Crystal

2011-07-21T17:46:00.000-07:00

Some months ago I met a colleague M at work who is an instrument-rated power pilot but had never been in a glider. We finally got our schedules in sync and went out to Crystalaire this Sunday. We talked about flying there from Fullerton airport in his club's Cessna to maybe save some time. (Conversely, I've never been in a Cessna.) But there was a good possibility of morning overcast in the LA basin, so we decided to drive up instead. The forecast high was about 95-99F with only 5 knots of wind from the southwest, so it looked like a good day for thermals. I printed out both the thermal forecast and the wave forecast so I could go over them with him on the drive.

We talked about the contrast between M's flying experience and mine:
- He typically flies in congested airspace, and usually files IFR even in VFR conditions.
- I typically fly in uncontrolled airspace, and have only talked to ATC during a couple of flights.

One of his main concerns is staying clear of other traffic. Usually all we see are other gliders and the towplanes. Occasionally a military transport or helicopter passes through the Crystal area, but they're pretty rare. When we do see other gliders in the air, we often circle with them in a thermal in very close proximity, so this was going to be a quite different experience for him.

After prepping the glider and having some lunch, we had quite a delay waiting for a tow. Seems the second tow pilot scheduled for the day was sick, so things were taking a while with just one. It was plenty hot on the ground, probably about 99 or 100F; the OAT gauge in the Grob 103 read quite a bit higher and I didn't believe it. We took off about 1:30, took a 3500' tow (up to 6900' MSL) and let off in strong lift. Other pilots had reported "zero sink everywhere, and narrow thermals". That's what I found over the Second Ridge - bits of lift that would take us up 100' or so at a time, but nothing great. And it was not acting like the wave lift from my last flight. (The wind was not strong at all, and no rotor turbulence.)

I tried all the way down the slope of the Second Ridge and found little, so we headed back over the desert. I always hate to give up on the mountains, because although there's often good lift over the flatlands, it's never been tall enough to let me get back up on the hills. On the way back I let M take the stick and rudder for a few minutes to get a feel for these long wings.

Not far from the airport, we found one of the "house thermals" and climbed quite well. It took some work to stay in it, but we quickly gained over a thousand feet. After tanking up a bit, we flew around looking at the area, tried a couple of stalls, and worked some other minor thermals.

We went back and found that house thermal again. It got stronger and easier to exploit the higher we went. M spotted another glider off in the distance, and it soon came over to join us, at least a thousand feet below. It was a high-performance DG-1000, and soon outclimbed us: better ship, better pilot. Once M saw how this whole "gaggling" process worked, he was fascinated and really enjoyed the experience. Although the other ship was just a few hundred feet away from us at times, his climb was slow relative to our position. We kept our positions pretty well on opposite sides of the circle, so we really never approached each other. It's really quite fun to thermal together - a slow dance in the sky - as long as there are not too many ships to keep an eye on. M had a great time. A third glider (a lower-performance trainer) came in below us, at least a thousand feet down, and never got up near our altitude.

We got up close to 8,000 MSL, and the DG headed for the hills, so we did too. I found a little bit of lift over the lower part of the hills, and we flew for a while about a thousand feet higher than we had released in that same area. So that marks the first time I have been able to get back from the desert to the mountains. I did not find anything to take us higher than 8,000', but I think the DG pilot did.

After about an hour and a half of flight, we decided to head back. M was nearly out of water, and that's a long time to sit in a glider the first time. We came back in for a total flight time of 1:40. M was amazed at the distance the glider floated in ground effect after flaring - another difference due to those long wings.

All in all, a fun day introducing another pilot to soaring.

Mountain wave passenger flight

2011-06-27T21:06:00.000-07:00

My friend Jim has been wanting to go for a glider flight for a long time, and we finally decided the only way we'd work it into our schedules was to take a day off work and just go. He'd been in a small power plane before, so we figured he'd do fine in a glider. Today the forecast for Crystalaire was for 99F, good thermal lift, winds out of the west-southwest at 10 to 15 knots.

We took off about 1:00 in light south-southwest winds and let off in good lift over the Second Ridge. We very easily gained 2,000 feet, and then another 1,000. Couldn't quite break the 10,000' mark, but it was working well. I kept the banking to about 35 degrees, and Jim handled it just fine. I looked around for more lift, and all I found was light sink and some turbulence upwind of the ridge. It was a little puzzling, because the south side of the ridge wasn't working like ridge lift based on where I thought the wind was coming from. Not finding a second thermal, we dropped off the hills and out to the desert... and found no lift there either. We landed after 38 minutes. I knew the lift must be better than that, because other gliders had been up for an hour or more. Jim was game, so we decided to give it another try.

We let off again in good lift, a little higher this time. I heard two other gliders on the radio trying to make visual contact, and one said he was at "13,400 in wave over the Punchbowl". Hmm... I'm over the Punchbowl too, but about 4 to 5 thousand feet lower. Huh? Wave? Duh! Of course! Wave! That wasn't thermal lift last time, and it wasn't random turbulence south of the ridge, it was rotor! The wind was blowing over the tops of the mountains, bouncing off the floor of the valley south of Second Ridge, and going up. So... I flew parallel to the ridge and immediately contacted smooth wave lift at about 5 knots. Then 6 knots. Occasionally 8 knots. Eventually 10 knots! In no time we were over 11,000 feet. I found where the rotor started south of the wave, and found the apparent east and west limits of the lift. We got as high as 12,200 feet, though much of the time we were down around 10,500. This is more like it!

This was really only my second time flying in serious wave lift, so I spent some time exploring the limits of it and just enjoying the view and giving my friend a nice smooth scenic ride - that wave lift is amazingly smooth! After about an hour and a half we decided to head back out over the desert and shoot for a two-hour total total time. I knew that losing 6,000 feet would take a while. Heading north, I found sequential patches of moderate turbulence and smooth lift. So I think I traversed secondary and tertiary waves. As we were wrapping up our flight, I heard one of those two other gliders going in for a landing, but the other checked in at 16,000'. We ended up just two minutes short of two hours on that second flight.

So my lesson for today: a south or southwest wind across the San Gabriel mountains can set up wave where I have been looking for thermal and ridge lift. What's surprising to me is how short the wavelength is. From the top of the ridge where I think the wind is getting deflected upward, to the upward flow of the primary wave seemed to be about just 3.5 miles. All the soaring educational materials I've seen about wave talk about the wind bouncing off a stable air layer down low, not off the ground, so I have not been thinking about the wave setting up right in the mountains, but that's what it seems to be doing. And the wind was not all that strong: 10 knots on the ground, not sure how strong at altitude. So I need to think about wave forming in a wider variety of conditions than the books talk about.

A great day!

Thermal and ridge lift today at Crystalaire

2011-05-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

Our club planned an outing for the long weekend, but it did not go as planned due to the weather. The NWS issued wind warnings for the Antelope Valley, and many of our club members decided not to go. I've seen that sometimes the Crystalaire area is not as windy as the surrounding area, and we already had reservations at a place nearby, and we had nothing else planned for the weekend, so my wife and I went anyway. Well, I should have listened to the NWS this time! Saturday started out not too bad, just light winds at ground level, but upstairs it was a different story. Some very experienced glider pilots and tow pilots came back saying it was the worst turbulence they'd ever seen, and by about noon everyone was calling it a day. Sunday was forecast to be cool, cloudy, and windy, so we packed up and went home. These things happen sometimes with weather-related sports.

Monday was looking much better, so I headed back out. It was warm, clear, light wind forecast. The morning inversion was forecast to dissipate, with thermals possible up to 8500' or so. (I use NOAA's soundings web site at http://www-frd.fsl.noaa.gov/mab/soundings. Check it out! If a formal sounding is not available for your favorite soaring site, it will interpolate one from the closest available ones.) Forecast high was for 76F, but NWS often underestimates desert high temps, and I know it got up to about 81F in the afternoon.

Some other folks wanted to do dual flights in the Grob, so I flew the PW5, taking off a little before 2:00. I let off in lift at 7700' MSL, and found a weak thermal right away, but it only took me to 8200. Eventually I found some that got me up to 9200, and I went farther east than I have before, just a couple of miles. I'm still kind of conservative at this site - I like to stay fairly close to home until I get comfortable with how much altitude I need to get back from various locations. (I did not take my flight computer today.) I could see other gliders at least a couple thousand feet higher, but I could not seem to beat 9200'.

One problem is that the variometer on this glider is intermittently unreliable. That may sound redundant, but it's true. Some days it works fine, other days it's all over the place. Last time I flew, it was fine, and we concluded that maybe there was water or debris in the static lines that had resolved itself. Well, the gremlins were back today! I intentionally took along my clip-on electronic vario, but there are two problems with it: 1) it's not very loud, and 2) it only tells me about lift, not sink. Flying in the mountains, I'd like to keep an eye on the sink as well. So... although it may sound like an excuse (especially to the seat-of-the-pants gurus), partial vario info makes me not want to go very far into the mountains. I think we need to tear the whole static system apart and clean it out.

Some of the lift was too widespread to be thermal, so I began to think it was ridge lift. There was a bit of a northwest wind - I could tell from my drift. I did not think it was strong enough to really generate much ridge lift, but apparently it was. I need to rethink my image of ridge lift: instead of a classic ridge perpendicular to the wind, this terrain was a bunch of short ridges, some of which were oriented against the wind. So each little spur was generating its own lift in a small area. Something to remember and try to exploit in the future.

I developed a bit of a headache after an hour or so. I turned on the oxygen for a while although I was only at about 8500', thinking it might help... it didn't. So I didn't push it, I came back to some of the closer ridges and worked some well-known thermal generators such as the Chimney. I was able to work a thermal up to 9700'. After about an hour and a half I decided to go out over the desert and try a few things.

I realized some time ago that my flying style is pretty "tame": wings-level most of the time, fairly gentle turns, never getting much above best L/D speed except to get out of sink. I've wanted to loosen up and have a little more fun in the air, but often I do not have enough excess altitude to experiment very much. Today I did, so I played around with some dives and climbs and steep climbing turns. Not quite what you would call wingovers, but definitely more extreme than I usually do. (Yes, instructors, I did clearing turns first.)

I found a few thermals over the desert, and could have stayed up longer, but I came in at just under two hours.

The lift was definitely working today - other club members went to the top of Mt. Baldy - I just didn't quite connect with the best stuff. That's on my to-do list for a day when the instruments are working better, and after I've studied the charts a bit more so I know the distances and escape routes.

RSS Feed

2011-05-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

I've set up my blog with an RSS feed. You may now see an RSS logo in your browser which you can just click to add Roger's Soaring Blog to your RSS reader. If the icon doesn't appear or doesn't work, you can use the following URL:

feed://rogersoaring.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Thermal Season Begins with Passenger Flights

2011-04-18T19:16:00.001-07:00

My cousin R and his wife J have been wanting to go soaring for a while now, and I've been waiting for the thermal season to begin so I could give them more than a "sled ride". Well, it's been warming up in the high desert, and reports out of Crystalaire have indicated that the thermals were popping the previous weekend, so things were looking up. We headed out there on Saturday. (The forecast high temperature was 87F.) As it turned out, no one else in the club was planning to fly the Grob that day, so I was able to take my time and show them all aspects of the ship as we washed and inspected and prepped it. Both had been in small planes before, so they were interested and eager.

The Grob had had some maintenance done on it earlier in the week, so I took it up for a checkout flight to pattern altitude before flying with passengers. Although it was well before noon, there were little bumps on tow, so it looked like things would heat up. I tried for a precision landing right on the numbers, and bounced the landing - haven't done THAT in a long time.

We had lunch and waited for a few others to stay up so we'd be pretty sure the thermals were working. J and I took off about 1:10, took a 3,000' tow and let off over the Second Ridge (there were some decent bumps on tow). We didn't find much there over the hills, and I'm new enough to this area that I didn't want to get too low, so pretty soon we headed out over the desert.

We found a couple of other gliders that were climbing, so we slipped in underneath them. I had explained earlier that this was one of the fun aspects of soaring: flying in a "gaggle" with other gliders. We worked it for a while and were able to gain a thousand feet. I kept checking to see if J was OK with the circling, and she was doing just fine. This thermal seemed to top out at 6,000' MSL, so we went looking for others. Didn't find any... came back to this first one... and it was no longer working. I never did find more lift in the region, so we came back in, for a total flight time of 42 minutes. That's probably about right for a first glider flight anyway. This time my landing was smooth, that is until turning off the runway into the stopping area. Wow, that dirt area is rough!

R was up next, and we took off just about one hour after the first launch. Things had heated up, and we felt a bit more turbulence on tow, but not bad. R video'd the takeoff and tow. This time I held on a little longer, and we towed further up the Second Ridge until we found some good lift. This tow was about 3,500' AGL. We immediately climbed about 500' in 2-3 knot lift. Not bad, but nothing spectacular. It seemed kind of disorganized, and I couldn't find more than 1 knot over the hills after topping out that first thermal. Not much over First Ridge or the punchbowl either, so once again we headed for the "house thermal" west of the airport. There we met up again with two other gliders, so R also got to fly in a gaggle, and was a great help keeping the others in sight. R also was not bothered by the circling. (I've written before about how passenger flights are sometimes a difficult balance between circling to stay aloft, and trying to have a gentle flight to avoid causing airsickness.)

We were working the thermal pretty well, when suddenly my portable radio "jumped" and landed down by my foot. Since I was flying from the rear seat to give my passengers the better view, I could not use the glider's built-in radio (there's only a boom mic in the front seat), so I was using my handheld, my headset, and my Velcro-attached push-to-talk switch. I have a wide Velcro strap that goes around my leg, and the radio's belt clip goes on the strap. Well, the belt clip on the newer, larger battery pack is a little smaller and does not clip firmly on the strap. It's never caused a problem until today, when it crept off the strap and fell down in the footwell. As soon as this happened I straightened out and left the thermal to deal with the radio. It was j-u-s-t out of reach - you can't lean forward in a four-point harness. Fortunately gliders can fly pretty well by themselves for short periods of time, so I trimmed it for minimum sink speed, leveled the wings, centered the rudder and went hands-off and feet-off. Also fortunately, there was no traffic in the direction we were gliding, but I still had to keep a lookout. I was beginning to think I was going to have to unstrap, when I finally got it by the antenna. By the time I got it back in place and plugged in, and dealt with another couple of distractions, we had lost a few hundred feet out of this already fairly weak thermal.

We cruised all around the airport area, even tried to poach off another glider, but he wasn't climbing either. We didn't find any more lift, so we came in for a smooth landing at - how about that? - 42 minutes, same as the previous flight.

Once on the ground, I checked with a few other pilots and several said the same thing: we found one good thermal to keep us up for a while, then nothing.

So, all in all it was a fun day. Both of my cousins enjoyed their intro flights, and we were able to thermal long enough for them to get some idea of why we crazy sailplane pilots keep coming back for more.

Flight trace video of my wave flight

2011-04-17T21:59:00.000-07:00

I sometimes record traces of my flights with the SeeYou Mobile program running on an iPaq. I then play them back on the SeeYou PC program to study how things went. I've recorded a playback of my April 2 wave flight and posted it on YouTube - first time I've figured out how to do that. It's played back at 10 times the actual speed, so my 2 hour and 20 minute flight plays back in 14 minutes. Here's the link.

If you just want to see the time when I really connected with the lift and started climbing at a good rate, go to 8:05 through 11:42 in the movie (which is about 13:42 to 14:18 on the flight clock).

Blanik L13 Testing and Modification Plan Completed

2011-04-13T21:11:00.001-07:00

Great news! A plan is now in place for inspecting and altering the Blanik L13 structure to determine which aircraft can be returned to service. The proposal has been submitted to the EASA and FAA, and the first few gliders have returned to the air in Europe. Details are available here and here. No info yet on the cost of the program.

Great First Solo Wave Flight

2011-04-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

Today a weak front was causing a southwest-to-northeast flow, which made for mountain wave conditions at Crystalaire - the first day it's actually been working since the day of my site intro flight. There were monster wave clouds, closer to the airport than I had seen before, probably too high to be of use to us, but indicating good wave action. As I was prepping the PW5, Dale (very experienced instructor) came over to give me some advice on how to fly the wave today. That was nice - I was going to seek him out! He thought it was weakening today and not likely to go over about 8,000 to 9,000 feet, with maybe some thermal lift later in the day if the cloud cover was not too thick.

I took off at 12:20 and we towed through rotor on the way to wave lift. A high tow was necessary to get there, and I let off at about 8,500 MSL when the rotor abruptly quit. I was immediately in weak to moderate wave lift. I worked it for a while, trying the areas where people had said it had been working a little while ago. I found up to about 3.3 knots of lift in the beginning. I gained some, lost some, in it sometimes, in sink sometimes - worked between 6,700 and 8,800 for quite a while, feeling it out and trying to figure out exactly where it was. Every time I got back into a little rotor, I headed back upwind and found wave lift. It wasn't very wide, so I had to go back and forth in a fairly narrow "sweet spot". A couple times I found *heavy* sink as I got too close to the mountain, as expected (since the wind was "spilling" downslope before it bounced back up again).

A couple times I decided to head back to the flatlands, and when I went over the "second ridge" I contacted even stronger lift. At times it was up to 7.7 knots! (Later I was reminded that the waves tend to move downwind over time.) I finally got smart and realized I needed to turn back sharply when the lift started to weaken, so I could get right back to the good stuff. This worked really well, and I worked it up... and up... topping out at 10,200 feet. Another pilot worked it from 10 up to 11 while I was there, and Dale got to 14!

In this flight trace, the later part is in the upper left, and you can see how much tighter I was making my back-and-forth passes.

(Click on the image to see the full-sized picture.)

As many people have said, the lift in the wave is incredibly smooth. At times there's almost no sensation of motion if you're headed into the wind. In this next trace, the line color shows groundspeed. There were times when my GS was as little as 17 knots.

After about two hours I decided to come down. On the way back to the airport I continued to find lift up to 10,200, but also some pretty hard rotor. I eventually pulled 1/3 spoilers and turned lots of circles to get down. The lift was so strong and easy to find I could have stayed up a long time.

Approach and landing were challenging. I called in for a wind report, and was told it was from the southeast at 15 with stronger gusts, so I chose to land on runway 7 (to the east). On the way into the pattern I continued to get battered by turbulence, a couple of those big bumps that knock everything around in the cockpit and lift you out of the seat even with the belts tight. On short final I got a couple more fairly hard bumps. I carried some extra speed due to the expected headwind component, so I was able to control it pretty well, but once I got down low I put it down as soon as I could - no floating in ground effect - I wanted to be on the ground! Once I started to slow down a bit, I found out how strong that crosswind really was. It turned me about 45 degrees to the right and off the runway. (The PW5 has a decent sized tail but a tiny rudder, so crosswinds really push it around.) I applied full spoilers and wheel brake and stopped just a few feet to the side of the runway.My wings were level, or I should say right wing down a bit because of the crosswind, so I don't think I even came close to touching a wing. But it sure turned me!

Later the fellow who gave me the wind check said that although the wind sock showed it to be from the southeast, when he stepped outside a few minutes later he saw how cross it was. By that time I was committed to 7. Some other folks pointed out that there is a dirt crosswind runway which would have been much more into the wind, and in fact someone landed on it moments later.

So although I landed safely, I learned two big lessons:

Even with a wind report from the ground, make sure to look at the wind socks or tetrahedron for confirmation. I was approaching the field perpendicularly, so I knew by the time I could see the socks I would be really close and need to commit to a direction, so I relied on the report. And I was dealing with a lot of turbulence and a strong headwind, so I really didn't plan for or have enough altitude to overfly the field.
Know all of the resources available. Even if I had known how cross the wind was, I really had not thought about the value of that other dirt runway. I chose between 7 and 25 based on the wind direction, but I did have another option which would have been better.

My flight was 2 hours and 20 minutes, and up to 10,200 feet MSL. Not bad for my first day of surfing the mountain wave.

Progress Toward Hemet-Ryan

2011-03-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

This week the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, on the advice of their counsel, declined to appeal the ruling of the FAA to allow gliders to operate at Hemet-Ryan Airport. One more obstacle out of the way! It will take a few months to work out arrangements (leasing space, filing operating plans, etc.). But it looks like it will happen!

Sunglasses for Soaring

2011-03-12T14:13:00.000-08:00

A reader asked me about sunglasses. Here's what I know and what I think.

Aviator sunglasses are designed to prevent light from coming from a wide range of angles, so they all tend to have a large teardrop shape. They don't change much to follow fashion. I happen to like mine, so I wear them for general use as well, not just for flying. A long time ago, I used to get headaches from bright sunlight, so I tend to wear sunglasses most of the time I'm outdoors or driving.
Polarized sunglasses generally should NOT be used for aviation. Two reasons - one pretty obvious, one more subtle:

Cockpit glass and canopy (or plastics) may have some unintentional polarization, and when combined with polarized sunglasses can show dark spots, distracting color patterns, and even large dark areas which can greatly interfere with vision. Some instrument glass windows, devices such as handheld GPS units and PDA's, and digital watches can also be partly polarized and difficult to read. We need to reduce problems in the cockpit, not create them.

Polarized sunglasses are designed to cut glare. But sometimes a little glare is a good thing! When we're flying, we're always looking for other air traffic, sometimes at great distances. Depending on light conditions, sometimes a "glint" off a distant aircraft's canopy is all you ever get to see - but that may be enough to catch your eye and distinguish the aircraft from a plain background or from ground clutter. Polarized sunglasses tend to filter out that "glint" and make it harder to see small, distant aircraft. Glare from our own aircraft tends to be not so much of a problem, due to the design and colors of dashboards, cowlings, etc., so I've never felt that losing the polarization caused me any local problems.
I started out using American Optical's FG-58 sunglasses. They were advertised as kind of the "standard" aviator sunglasses used by the military. They were OK, but due to the straight and kind of heavy design of the temple, I found them a little uncomfortable. They're pretty rugged. Although I've switched away from them, I still keep them in my gear bag as a backup, or in case I ever have a passenger who needs sunglasses.
When I started using a PDA for soaring navigation, I found the AO's to be too dark. I couldn't see my iPAQ's screen. I switched to "gradient" sunglasses in which the lower part is not as dark as the upper part. That way when I glance down I can see the PDA screen, but when I'm looking out the cockpit I get more protection.

All that could apply to any kind of aviation. But for soaring, there's one other feature that I learned to love. Yellow lenses help you see cloud structure better than other colors. It sounds like a trick, but seeing is believing. There's something about the colors of light that water transmits, and the fact that yellow lenses filter out more blue light, that enhances the contrast of clouds, especially the thin wispy parts.

When we're soaring on a day when cumulus clouds exist, we look for clouds that are just starting to form - they have the strongest lift. If you look at the bottom of a "young" CU, it may look flat or slightly concave. That's where the rising moist air cools to the dew point and the cloud forms. But look carefully below the bottom of the cloud. Sometimes you can see that it is not a definite line, you can see wispy trails leading up to the base. You're actually seeing the water vapor starting to condense, and you'll see it more in some places under the cloud than others. Those are the areas of strongest lift. Try this (even from the ground) with and without yellow sunglasses. Huge difference! With lenses of other colors you may not see those wisps at all and with the yellow lenses they pop out at you. Sometimes you can spot the wisps a few minutes before you can see the CU at all - and when you're hunting lift, sometimes that makes all the difference.

So I'm now using Serengeti Aviators Drivers Gradient glasses. I like them a lot. Only two things I would improve about them:

The lenses are not as hard as some other sunglasses. I scratched my first pair after a year or two, right in front of my pupil. I got another pair and am much more careful with them. I always keep them in a semi-rigid case with a soft lining.
The temples are a pretty thin wire. They're strong, that's not a problem. But I have a radio earpiece that I clip on when flying some gliders, and the temple is so narrow the clip slides around a bit. Not a big problem - I much prefer the smaller and lighter temple compared to the AO's.

FAA rules in favor of soaring at Hemet-Ryan Airport

2011-02-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

We won! After a year and a half, the FAA has ruled that the County of Riverside violated Federal law when it closed the glider runway and prohibited gliders from taking off on the main runway at Hemet-Ryan Airport.

Since they have accepted Federal grant money in the past, they must not discriminate against any type of aviation activity unless there's a safety issue. FAA ruled that gliders can operate safely, recommended some procedures, and ordered two-minute windows for winch launching, which we did not even ask for!

The County must submit a plan, negotiate in good faith, and consult with FAA, or they will be denied future Federal funding. Unfortunately the FAA ruled that the County does not have to pay costs or damages incurred by the clubs and private owners that were displaced.

Our club, the Orange County Soaring Association, filed the complaint. We've been fine-tuning our winch operations at several other locations and hope to return soaring to Hemet-Ryan in the near future. First we have to see how the County reacts, file an operations plan, etc. Stay tuned!

More information:

Winch launch in the PW5

2011-02-07T22:27:00.000-08:00

This weekend we again conducted winch launches at Crystalaire gliderport. The weather was nice - low 70's all day, enough to create a little "zero sink" lift, but not enough wind to help with the launches. (Sorry to any eastern readers... not trying to rub it in!)

You might recall that the other times I tried winch launching in the PW5 (almost a year ago) I had an aborted takeoff and then a winch failure, so I've never really had a good launch. Since I had four good launches in the Grob 103 two weeks ago, I was eager to try the PW5 again.

The CG hook on the PW5 is really low to the ground, well below the actual center of gravity, so there's a significant rotational moment which raises the nose. On a glider with a tailwheel on the ground, that's not a problem. But the PW5 rests on its nosewheel, with its tail up in the air, and that rotation caused the tail to strike the ground as soon as the winch started pulling. Our winch has been improved over the last few months, so it's even stronger than before and could really slam the tailboom, so we decide to start with the tail on the ground. The way to do that is to have a person hold down the stabilizer until the glider starts its ground roll. That means that the nose is pitched up at a rather unusual attitude. What does that mean for the elevator position - will I need to hold the nose up, or push it down to fly level? What about the trim setting, which for my weight is supposed to be fairly far forward? These are all things I'll have to work out in the first... um... 0.7 seconds of the takeoff roll.

The first launch starts out smoothly enough. The nose angle seems good, and there's no tendency to PIO like my first time. But I'm keeping an eye on the line and the parachute, and I'm flying faster than it again. Before I am high enough to rotate into the climb, the 'chute disappears below me on the left side, so I have to release and land straight ahead (which goes perfectly well).

The ground crew agrees it was straight and smooth and good, but they say there was a gust of tailwind just as I took off. That probably helped the glider accelerate and helped the parachute inflate, which contributed to outrunning the line. And our experience has shown that once the 'chute inflates, the glider always passes it by. What to do? We decide that the winch driver needs to not use full speed with the PW5, so it won't accelerate so fast, and will keep some load on the line in the early part of the flight. The PW5 empty is 400 pounds lighter than the Grob 103, and it only carries one person, so it's nearly 600 pounds lighter all told. It just doesn't need full power like the big Grob 103 does. We also think that keeping the nose up slightly will present some drag, which will help keep the line taut.

Launch #2 goes just fine. The line stays tight, I can gain a little altitude, and then rotate into the climb. The speed in the climb stabilizes at 60 knots, right where I want it to be (the maximum allowed is 65). It climbs just fine. Finally the glider starts to level out, and I can look down and see that I'm nearly over the western airport fence. So I nose over to relieve the line tension, and release at about 1300 feet AGL. If there had been a headwind it would have been higher.

We've designated an area to the left of the runway where we can look for lift without interfering with either the right (glider) landing pattern or the left (towplane) pattern. I look around there and find a little zero sink, but nothing strong enough to lift me up more than 150 feet or so. The thermal forecast for today did look like there could be lift - no inversion to stop it - but it was not to be. With only 450 feet above pattern altitude to play with, I couldn't go very far, and soon enough I was calling my pattern entry. I had a good landing and rolled off into the parking area.

Later three other pilots launched in the PW5. Two of them had done it before, and one had not. One of them thought that his weight would be enough to counteract the rotational moment, so he opted to start with the tail up. Wrong! Slam! After that one, we all agreed that we need to always hold the tail down. I think everyone's release altitude was about 1300 to 1500 feet.

Here's a video of one of the other pilots launching. From the time you hear the line boss say "Launch, launch, launch" until the glider is in the air, it's about 2.5 to three seconds! This one is noisy, but that's just normal bouncing noise since we're launching on dirt with some rocks. The tail-slam was even louder!

Logbook in Excel

2011-02-04T23:34:00.000-08:00

I've copied my flights from my paper logbook into an Excel spreadsheet for several years. There are several advantages to having my logbook in electronic format:

Easy to search for a particular flight
Does the time arithmetic to carry forward from page to page
Can print a copy for safekeeping
Can use Excel analysis tools to count up flights and time in different ways. Like: "How many times have I flown model X vs. model Y?" I used it a lot when writing my last post, Review of 2010.

I've added several Pivot Tables to the spreadsheet recently to make that analysis really easy. I thought others might like to give it a try, so I've posted it for download here. Instructions are provided on the second tab. It has a few glider-specific fields, but it could easily be adapted for power pilots' use as well. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Review of 2010

2011-01-30T22:00:00.000-08:00

2010 had its ups and downs. I completed my Silver badge, but we saw our training fleet grounded and our club struggled to find a new operating model. Here are some highlights.

I had a total of 28 flights, 5 fewer than in 2009, but 17 hours, 4 more than in 2009:

Nine flights with instructors
Seven flights with other Private pilots
No flights with student pilots
Two passenger flights
That leaves 10 solo flights
No cross-country flights
Four winch launches

I got around some:

Four flights at 29 Palms
Ten flights at Crystalaire
Six flights at Lake Elsinore
Eight flights at Tehachapi

I worked toward my Commercial and Instructor ratings early and late in the year:

Two flights at Lake Elsinore in the Blanik L13
Seven flights at Crystalaire in the Grob 103

Along the way, I did have a major accomplishment and some fun flights:

I had my longest flight ever, 5 hours and 11 minutes, to complete my Silver badge. First time in my life I've had someone douse me with champagne!
First really successful flights exploiting shear line lift at Tehachapi
First flights at Crystalaire.
Learned a bit about flying in wave over the mountains near Crystal. Lots more to learn!
A really successful passenger flight in which we were able to thermal with gentle turns

And some bad news:

All Blanik L13's worldwide were grounded after an accident in Europe. They're grounded until a testing plan is developed and approved. (I did get to learn some interesting things about aircraft safety and documentation procedure as I helped prepare paperwork related to our club Blaniks.)
The FAA never ruled on our complaint about Hemet-Ryan airport, so we lost a whole year in that battle. The ruling is due "any day now".
My plans to take my Commercial and Instructor Practical Tests did not progress much. I was not satisfied with the prospects of taking the tests at Lake Elsinore, and we lost the use of the Blaniks. Late in the year we placed our Grob at Crystal, and I resumed training late in December.

So... another mixed year. I continued to fly as much as possible, but there were three months I did not fly at all, the most I've ever sat out. We'll see what happens in 2011 - I'm hoping to do some cross-country out of Crystal, and I'm hoping to fly at some other gliderports as I take a family trip to Kansas in the summertime. And I have several friends and relatives who say they want to fly this year.

Winch Launching the Grob 103 at Crystalaire

2011-01-30T20:25:00.000-08:00

Over the last few years our club has developed our winch launching program by refurbishing our winch, by training a number of pilots, and by testing it at several different locations. We have launched the Blanik L13's many times, and the PW5 single-seater several times. Our Grob 103 Twin Astir did not have a center-of-gravity hook, and it was considered pretty heavy and not really a training ship, so we had never winch launched it. The grounding of the Blanik L13 fleet put us on hold for a while, but the club refused to give up. We found out that there is an approved CG hook add-on for our ship, which could be purchased and installed for less than $1,000. It was completed on our ship in mid-January. And some of our mechanically adept members have made improvements to the winch which have increased its power and reliability. The operators of Crystalaire have been open to having us conduct winch launches there. The runway plus dirt extensions add up to about 4500 feet which is plenty long for winch launching. So finally it has all come together. The question remained: how well would the winch launch the Twin Astir?

So the club organized a "Winch Weekend" at Crystal. I wasn't able to make it Saturday, which was just as well because the winch engine broke down after just two launches. But the crew was able to get the part and fix it early Sunday morning, so we were back in business.

Winds were good, probably 8-10 knot and at just a slight angle to the runway. Our instructor took a solo flight, then did some flights with one of the senior instructors from Crystal. The verdict was in: the combo of our winch and our Grob 103 Twin Astir works great! It accelerates really well, climbs straight and smooth. The winch has plenty of power, and its shifting of gears is not a problem. Launches were anywhere from 1300' to 1600' in the early flights. We also launched one of Crystal's gliders which I think is about 100 pounds heavier, with a greater wingspan and much better performance, and it got up to 1800'. Wow!

I was next up for a couple of launches with our instructor. If you've been following my blog you'll recall that I have had quite a few winch launches in Blanik L13, and several abortive launches in the PW5. The first few times I winch launched in the Blanik L13 it really got my attention: 0 to 55 in about three seconds, really startling the first time. I expected the heavier G103 would accelerate a little more slowly. Quite the opposite: with our beefed-up winch, the acceleration is even faster. The first one this time actually gave me a bit of a "head rush". I estimate we're now going to 50 or 55 in less than two seconds. I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and I think that's between 2.5G and 3G or more of acceleration. To put this in perspective, some of you may be familiar with thrill rides that use linear induction motors to accelerate ride vehicles. The one I'm familiar with is California Screamin' at Disney's California Adventure park. It goes from 0 to 55 in four to five seconds. I think the acceleration of our winch launch is nearly twice that. (I didn't notice the "head rush" effect on later launches.)

Once we were moving, the G103 seemed very smooth and eager to climb. I focused mostly on staying wings-level in the climb. The best climb rate requires having the stick all the way back or nearly so. There's sometimes just a little "porpoising" as the line gets little amounts of slack or as the winch shifts gears, but it's not very noticeable. My first launch was to 1300' AGL. The first thing I noticed after getting off the rope was that it's a little difficult to get one's bearings. During the climb, you can hardly see the ground due to the steep angle. Getting off the line nearly over the winch, the airport is behind and below, and you can't see it until you turn. All you can see is the nearly featureless desert. Once we completed our turn first turn I could see the airport and get reoriented.

On the second launch, we got to 1500' AGL but then the weak link broke. We don't think we pulled on it too hard, because that launch was about the same as the previous 5 or so of the day. It may be that the link was getting weaker with age and use, and it was just its time to break.

My first landing was not as close to the beginning of the dirt touchdown area as my instructor would have liked. Probably I was aiming a little further out because of the proximity of some wires on that end of the runway. The next time I brought it in steeper, established my aiming point closer in, and had a good landing (e.g. we didn't have to pull the glider back quite so far).

My third flight right after that was solo, and the launch went quite normally. I got up to 1400' AGL before releasing. Shortly after turning north I found lift, probably thermal. It was pretty big, and was anywhere from 300 fpm to 700 fpm and fairly consistent. I worked it for just a short while and probably could have soared away. (I spotted a hawk doing some aerobatics below me.) But this was not a day for soaring, since we were trying to get several people experienced with winch launching the Grob. So I came back after just 10 minutes. But I'm convinced that when the weather heats up we'll be able to hook thermals and get away.

A number of other people had instructional launches and short rides. I prepped the PW5 for flight, but it was getting late and we had other priorities, so I'll launch it another day. As it turns out, I flew the G103 once more late in the afternoon, the last flight of the day. One of the Crystal staff wanted to go for a ride (has flown in gliders many times but not had a winch launch). So off we went again. The initial acceleration was a little bumpy, which was new. Later we figured out that as we rotated the ship to line it up for launch, we dug the main wheel into a bit of a hole in the sandy soil. Next time we'll know to push it forward a bit so that it doesn't have the resistance of having to pull out of a hole. Not that it's a problem for the winch - plenty of power there! But it makes the initial roll start with a bump, which you don't need when you're getting to 55 in 2 seconds. Anyway, we got up to 1400' and released. We found a little sustaining lift but it didn't keep us up very long - by this time the sun was getting fairly low in the sky so the thermal was weaker. She had a great time, and we came back after just about 7 minutes. This time I intentionally landed long onto the paved runway (really smoothly, if I may say so), and rolled all the way to the east end of the airport, stopping perfectly in front of our tie-down spot.

I think we had a total of 14 winch launches that day. A good beginning to what we hope will be a new standard operating procedure for the club at this location.

Discontinuing work on Commercial and Instructor

2011-01-13T21:53:00.000-08:00

Followers of this blog will recall that I was days away from taking my Commercial and Instructor practical tests back in September 2009, when gliding at Hemet-Ryan airport was abruptly shut down. I had completed all three written tests, and completed all my flight training requirement. Since then it has been difficult to work out a combination of aircraft, gliderport, instructor, and examiner that would enable me to finish the practical tests at an acceptable cost.

Recently I had resolved those logistics, or so I thought. I had resumed working toward completing my Commercial certificate before my written test expires at the end of January, and my Instructor certificate by the middle of March. I have been flying with an instructor in the club Grob 103 at Crystal, revisiting the maneuvers for the flight test and getting current on the required instructional flights. I have come to realize that I would not be sufficiently prepared for either the oral or flight portions of the Commercial test by the end of January. In addition, trying to balance this work with a number of other family commitments and projects was causing me some problems. I simply needed more study time and more practice than I would be able to accomplish before the deadline. I could retake the written test and continue on, but I have decided it is not going to work out at this time. There are several factors leading to this decision:

Proficiency in the Grob. I was well prepared for this test a year and a half ago in the Blanik L13 (before the Hemet crisis). But I have three times as much experience in the L13, and the Grob 103 Twin Astir (at least our unit) is more difficult to fly precisely from the rear seat. Some of the things that I need to demonstrate for the test are things I have not used recently in recreational and cross-country flying, so I’m out of practice on those maneuvers. I could get there, but not quickly enough.

Preparation for oral knowledge testing. I was prepared for this part a year and a half ago, but that knowledge (airspace requirements, regulations etc.) fades if it’s not refreshed. Since the time the OCSA Grob became available at Crystal, and I located an acceptable examiner, I have not had time for refresher study due to a family situation that is requiring much more of my time over the last few months.

Cost. When I started on these ratings three years ago, I was able to work with the OCSA volunteer instructors (whom I greatly appreciate!), the tow fees were significantly less at Hemet, and the drive and gas prices were much less. (For example, Crystal does not offer a break on pattern tows.) I understand why Crystal’s tow fees are higher – better facilities, great services, and fuel has gone up – but I can’t afford $450 to $650 in tow and instructional fees and other expenses every flying day – and I would need many more flying days to go on to the Instructor rating. Getting the proficiency I need in the current situation will be too expensive. It could easily cost another $3,000 to $5,000 to complete the Instructor test. Maybe I’ll be able to resume in a lower-cost environment in the future… Lake Elsinore Soaring Club’s tow and instructor fees are lower, but there are some other issues in taking practical tests at that location that I will not comment on here.

Purpose. When I started on this three years ago, I planned to become a CFI in the club environment, and “give back” to OCSA and soaring. I realize that each certificate is a “license to learn”, and I was expecting to work under the guidance of our club CFIs, and work with our constant flow of primary students as I built up my knowledge and skills. Now that the OCSA teaching environment has changed due to the Hemet and Blanik L13 situations, I don’t know what I would even do with my CFI rating. I don’t envision working as a paid instructor on Saturdays at Crystal or anywhere else. I don’t especially want to teach in 2-33’s for Lake Elsinore Soaring Club. A CFI needs to train and solo and recommend a minimum number of students to stay current – and I don’t see that situation in my future anymore.

So until some of these factors change, I’ll put my Commercial and Instructor ratings on hold, and re-take my knowledge tests later if necessary. This is a difficult decision, since I have been working on this for three years. I greatly appreciate the training and guidance I have received from my instructors, and the support of my OCSA friends. I’ll continue to fly the Grob and PW5 for fun and wave experience at Crystal and elsewhere with OCSA, and look forward to some cross-country flights this summer.

Four busy flights

2011-01-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

Today at Crystalaire it was cold and calm, with only high clouds, so we were able to do some high flights for further preparation for my Commercial practical test. Most of it went well, except for some areas I'll delve into below. Four flights, one of them the highest tow I've ever taken so we would have time for a lot of air work. We covered many things, including: all tow signals, boxing the wake (my first time in a Grob 103), steep turns (nailed it!), stalls and detection of incipient stalls (straight, turning, with and without spoilers), spin awareness (we couldn't really get it to spin), hard slips (harder to control in the Grob than in Blaniks), slack line, slack line in turns, precision landings.

Slack line in turns gave me lots of trouble. This instructor teaches yet another method. When I first learned to fly, slack removal was accomplished by yawing the glider away from the towplane and then straightening it out just as the slack comes out. I learned to do that really well and smoothly. When I first trained for Commercial about two years ago, the instructor said current practice had switched to a "do nothing" method. Basically you realign the glider with the towplane and let the slack come out gradually as the glider slows down. This time around, the approach is a "climb and dive" method: align the glider and climb parallel to the towplane to slow down, then dive slightly and come back behind the towplane just as the slack comes out and the glider's speed again matches the plane's speed. I took several times to get what he was trying to show, and finally got some really good recoveries on the right side (left turns). On the left side, I got way out of line - I think I was diving and realigning way too early, causing even more slack. One time it came out so abruptly that I broke the weak link. Another time the slack got so big that we released from tow. This was really weird and difficult - not natural at all. Before today I'd had 275 flights, some with strong turbulence on tow, and I've never even come close to breaking a rope or getting such a huge loop of slack line. We debriefed about it later, and I'll study the book and we'll try it some more next time. I will learn to do it this way, but I want to think about it some before I try to teach it. This really seems much more complicated than it needs to be. I thought about practicing on Condor, but he says Condor doesn't allow slack. If any readers have comments on this topic, I'd like to hear them.

Precision landing is giving me some trouble, probably because I've not tried to do many of them in the Grob. Only about 20% of my flights have been in the Grob, and many of the landings were on long runways as opposed to the short-field landings we practiced so much in the Blaniks. We realized I was not using an aiming point but rather I was aiming for the touchdown point and not doing a sharp roundout, so I worked on that. (On the plus side, my speed control was much better than last time!) Also, I need to do a paradigm shift: initially I was taught to not touch the spoilers hardly at all after roundout: adding them can cause a hard landing, and closing them can cause ballooning. But I need to break out of that model and gently adjust spoilers to effect the touchdown exactly where I want it. I think that's harder in the Grob because the spoiler control is stiff and hard to finesse. CFI's recommendation is to brace my arm against the side, and use wrist motion rather than arm muscle to move it a tiny amount. So that's on the agenda for my next session.

Landing practice under low clouds

2010-12-18T17:26:00.000-08:00

Friday I went to Crystalaire to work with an instructor to prepare for my Commercial practical test. Although it was raining on the south-facing foothills as I drove up from Orange County, Crystal is in the "rain shadow" of the San Gabriel mountains and only had clouds. But very low clouds - so low it was not possible to do anything but pattern flights, and even on those we could not get above about 800 feet. (Fortunately in Class G airspace we just need to stay clear of clouds.) So that's what we did: seven low flights. This was our first time working together, and he's going to need to see if I'm flying to Commercial standards, so we would need to do this sometime anyway.

We did a mix of standard patterns, rope breaks, and abbreviated patterns. Sometime he gave me a target touchdown point and/or stopping point just after we released from tow, so I had to quickly plan my pattern and glideslope. (This may not sound like a big deal to readers who are power pilots, but remember that in a glider you can neither add power nor go around). The runway is a mile long, and there was very little traffic, so we could touch down at either end and roll to the far end if desired.

All my previous preparation for the Commercial test had been in our Blanik L13's. The Grob 103 is a slipperier ship, and has no flaps, so the energy management is different. I've flown it a lot, and have done some short-field landings in it at Hemet, but lots of my flights in it have been at Tehachapi where we also have a long runway. And many of my flights in it have been dual with other pilots, so I have fewer landings in it than I'd like. So I really have not done many "accuracy" landings in the Grob, nor have I ever slipped it very much.

I'd never done a rope break in the Grob before... this day I did two. Both went fine, except that my turn was not steep enough on the first one. In a high-L/D ship like this, you can really do a 180-degree turn from about 200 feet AGL and get back to the runway with excess height that you need to lose either with spoilers or a slip.

The final flight was a "no-drag-devices" approach. That means flying the whole pattern with no spoilers, only using a slip to bring it down. Again, I've done it in a Blanik before but not in the Grob. It really did not want to come down! I was in a full slip, giving it all the aileron and rudder that I could, and was still too high about 1/3 of the way over the runway. (It didn't help that I was letting my speed get way too high.) He took over and demonstrated that it's possible to get it into a deeper slip if you kick the rudder all the way over abruptly. Somehow that gives the fuselage enough momentum to carry it into a more extreme yaw than if you apply the rudder just as far but more gradually.

By the time I had put the ship away, had a debrief, and ate my lunch, the clouds were breaking up. But I don't think anyone else was around to fly. And the drive back down to the basin was again through heavy rain and fog. You can see it creeping over the mountains in this pic.

Why is soaring like fishing?

2010-12-12T18:30:00.001-08:00

One of the comments fisherman often hear is "You shoulda been here yesterday!" One of the comments I'm hearing lately at the gliderport is "There was wave all week!" This Saturday was pretty much the same as the last time I was at Crystalaire: northeast winds from the desert causing Santa Ana winds where I live, and really strong through the passes that lead into the high desert... but nearly calm at the airport and the adjacent mountains. We could see wave clouds about 40 miles to the east and 20 miles to the west, but nothing at Crystal. And the thermal forecast was dismal - very warm air aloft, NO chance of thermal formation although the surface temperature got up to the 70's (welcome to December in the California high desert).

So although no other gliders were staying up, I flew anyway just for the practice. My first flight at Crystal was an orientation with an instructor, and my second was with another club pilot who has flown there a lot, so I needed to get in the air by myself. We towed the glider to the west end of Runway 07... seemed like I walked a half a mile holding the wing. Oh, wait... it WAS a half a mile: that runway is 2600' long. Soaring does involve a bit of walking!

I was going to get a 4000' tow to the mountains and look for ridge lift. There was nothing over the "Second Ridge", so I hung on to 4700' feet AGL hoping to find something... ANYthing. I eventually pulled off and went back and forth over Second Ridge and got nowhere. At least I was not hitting any sink, so I didn't come down very fast.

I did encounter a little turbulence, so thinking that there MIGHT be a little wave action forming, I went back and forth through the valley between the ridges. Nothing.

I tried up and back over the First Ridge. I did encounter a narrow little bump. When I went back over that same spot and bumped again, I tried circling there but again found nothing.

Back out over the desert. Nothing but smooth air. No sink, so at least I was coming down at the normal sink rate for the Grob 103, which is about 15o feet per minute or so. I was back down on Runway 07 after 36 minutes. Pretty much a sleigh ride. But good practice, searching the ridges and learning how high I need to be at different points in order to maintain a safe final glide slope back to the airport. Now if a friend wants to go for a glider ride, I'll be comfortable taking them up from this airport.

I sat down with the Chief Instructor and worked out a plan to resume my final training and signoffs for my Commercial and Instructor certificates. Regular readers will recall that I was just days away from taking those test when all soaring was shut down at our home airport in Hemet. Since then I've been trying to work out the combination of aircraft, gliderport, instructor, and inspector that will let me successfully take those tests without breaking my soaring bank. Now that we have the Grob stationed at Crystal, I think it's feasible. I hope to complete these within three months. I'll continue to blog about how that process goes.

Silver Badge - kind of

2010-12-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

I see from the listing in this month's Soaring magazine that my Silver Badge has been approved. But I have not yet received the badge itself or a letter or email from the SSA. I know they had a change in the volunteer staff who handles the badge program, so I assume they're running a bit behind as they get started. But it's nice to know that my claim was accepted!

Dual flight at Crystal

2010-11-26T22:35:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been windy at Crystal, so I was hoping for some wave or ridge lift. Although there were strong Santa Ana winds through the Cajon Pass on the drive out, the air at Crystal was pretty dead. And it was not warm enough for thermal activity to be very strong. So we weren't expecting to soar - and we didn't. N and I took a 5000' tow at about 1:00 in the Grob 103. I flew the takeoff and tow and the part of the flight in the mountains. It was about 55-60 degrees on the ground, so I expected it to be pretty cold aloft, but it was not bad. We hit little bumps on some of the ridges, but not enough to sustain us. N took over as we came down over "Second Ridge" and I pulled out my camera. He found a little bit of lift down low over the desert, but again not enough to keep us up.

We ended up with a 37-minute flight, nothing to write home about. But it as good for me to fly dual in this new (to me) location.

First flight at Crystal

2010-10-24T22:04:00.000-07:00

Our club has placed our two glass ships at Crystalaire Airport (which we all call Crystal) in the desert north of the San Gabriel mountains. I'd never flown there, though several of our members had and said it was great. The problem for me is that it's farther from home, about an hour and 20 minutes each way, vs. 1 hour to Hemet and 45 minutes to Lake Elsinore. But with the Blaniks grounded, there's not much choice, so we're all getting "field checkouts" so we can fly there.

The commercial operation is very good, with nice facilities, friendly people, and good services. They have line crew for not only launching but towing gliders out and back with electric golf carts... nice office, clubhouse, shaded areas, nice restrooms. Very good! They have a 2600' paved runway with 1000' of dirt runway extensions on either end. Limited emergency landing options, but not too bad. Good tiedowns. Excellent information about their Standard Operating Procedures, as well as sources of lift, on their web site.

I got there about 9:15 and had an 11:30 appointment with an instructor. I got some ground orientation from some of the (regulars? employees?) and prepped our Grob 103. Very interesting weather conditions: clouds and drizzle where I came from south of the mountains, lots of lenticular clouds to the north, shear lines to the east and west where canyons cut through from the coastal side, high thick cirrus blocking the sun, and a moderate wind from the northwest. They said it was the first "wintry" day yet this season, and it was only about 68F by 11:00, so we did not expect much in the way of thermals.

We took off about 11:50, instructor X in the front seat and me in the rear. We towed up over the ridges and found NO thermal lift, so we kept going up to one of the mid-level peaks named Mt. Lewis. Still nothing. Finally near the top we found some lift and let off. It was probably the highest tow I have ever taken, 4700' AGL, but we needed the altitude in order to do a proper mountain flying checkout. They want to make sure we're well versed in the risks of mountain flying, since that's where most of the soaring occurs here. I'm not an expert, but I'm not without experience in the mountains. I've flown from Hemet-Ryan to nearly the top of Mt. San Jacinto, a gain of about 5,500', using thermal and ridge and a little anabatic lift. I've flown over the Tehachapis, using thermal and anabatic lift. And a couple of cross-country flights north from Tehachapi over the southern Sierras.

But today's lift was different. It was mountain wave lift, and it was going up adjacent to a ridge, not at all where I expected it, so it was somewhat confusing as to where the best lift actually was. X showed me how to feel the rotor turbulence, to go upwind from it to the wave lift, and to feel out where the (fairly weak) lift was the strongest. We flew back and forth looking for "sweet spots" and working up 1 hundred feet or so on each pass. He also demonstrated flying much closer to the peaks and rocks than I usually go. But let me point out that X is one of the most experienced and well-known instructors in the country, so I was in good hands. Occasionally he would say things like "let's go over here... usually not a good idea, but I want you to see what this is like...". These mountains are fairly rugged and with sharp tops, so the turbulence on the downslope side can be intense, and there's the downward side of the wave flow to watch out for too. I learned a lot, and flew higher in weak lift than I would have been able to do on my own. X pointed out my errors in coordination (I guess I'm a bit rusty in the Grob, with its heavy ailerons), and pointed out how I needed to improve in staying in the best part of the lift. Did I mention I learned a lot?

We eventually went back out over the desert, and X pointed out many lift sources as well as the many fields and airstrips and flat spots that are NOT landable, and the few that are. We found wave lift over the flatlands as well, and I got better at feeling the rotor and finding the wave. I guess I had always assumed wave lift was usually up high, but we were only about 3 to 4 thousand feet AGL. This area can get wave lift when the wind is coming from several different directions, so it's a major source of lift that we need to learn to exploit.

We eventually had to pull spoilers to get down, and landed after an hour and 20 minutes. I was careful not to overshoot the final turn as I have done a few times in the Grob, and actually ended up undershooting the turn a bit! But after straightening that out, my landing was really good - a long float in ground effect, smooth touchdown, and perfect roll off the runway into the wind into a stopping area. It's always a little intimidating flying with a new instructor, so I was pleased that I got a good landing to finish up with. And then the crew showed up with the cart to pull us back - I always dread pushing the Grob after a flight!

So although X and the others declared this was one of the worst soaring weather days they had seen in a long time, we got a good flight. One of our other members was coming out late in the day for his checkout, so I stayed and took care of a few equipment issues until he took off. A nice first day - I'm looking forward to coming out again soon. With the help of the line crew, it'll be feasible to come out and fly the PW5 even if no other club members are there. One of my goals will be to fly to the top of Mt. Baldy. It's about 10,000' high and the airport is at 3400', so with a 2500' tow the altitude gain will need to be about 4000'. I think it's actually a bit closer to the airport than Mt. San Jacinto is to Hemet, so it should be fairly easy, though the terrain in between is less forgiving.

The Blanik Dilemma

2010-09-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

In June, there was a fatal accident in Austria involving a Blanik L13 glider which lost a wing. The investigation is not yet complete, but the manufacturer / type certificate holder, known as LET, issued a mandatory bulletin restricting aerobatics and requiring an inspection (for cracks) and requiring that the results and the glider's usage history be sent back to LET for evaluation. Later, the FAA issued several versions of the same bulletin, requiring a more stringent inspection. LET was to evaluate each glider's usage history and rule as to whether the glider could continue in service.

The latest FAA version has taken back the decision process from LET, but it essentially grounded every L13 until it passes an even more detailed US-based inspection. But the inspection has not yet been defined, so the entire fleet is in limbo until it is.

Our club owns two L13's (built in 1973) which we use for primary instruction. We performed the original inspections and found no cracks. We examined the aircraft logbooks and gathered the required information about number of flights, number of hours, ratio of solo vs. dual flights, ratio of aerotow vs. ground launches, number of aerobatic flights, damage and repair history etc. Since I'm the secretary my club and I retain the older logbooks, I took on the task of compiling the usage information. It was really interesting to look at the history of these gliders I have been flying: who owned them, what they accomplished in them, how many hours the pilots accumulated, the various minor and major damages, when they gliders changed hands (or wings!), how long they sat idle... each one has a story to tell. I think I'll write an article for our club newsletter with some of the more interesting facts about each one. I learned a bit about the Airworthiness Directive, repair, and documentation processes as well.

The glider community (at least the segment of it that does flight instruction) is in a spin at the moment. There are about 200 L13's in use in the U.S. I'm guessing that they are second only to the Schweizer 2-33 in popularity as a training glider, and I'm sure that some commercial operators use L13's for tourist rides as well. So a large part of the U.S. training fleet (in clubs and commercial ops) is grounded. Rumor has it that the larger commercial operators are working with the FAA and SSA to develop the new inspection and approval process. No one knows how long this will take, how much the new inspection procedure will cost, or who will do the evaluation.

Rumor has it that someone in Europe is looking at acquiring "new" never-used L13's that have been in storage in Russia, and selling them after appropriate refurbishing and updating; since the concern is fatigue and not age, theoretically these would be "safer".

So here's the dilemma: Does one failure justify permanently grounding an entire model of aircraft? Blaniks are not failing at in flight frequently. Was the accident aircraft an extreme case, i.e. used for extensive aerobatics? Was their hidden damage not caused by fatigue? We just don't know. Clubs like ours that rely on L13's have had to cancel training, and will lose members to other clubs/operations that fly other ships. On the other hand, if L13's are reaching the end of their useful life, we as operators need to be responsible and not fly them if they are dangerous. Usage records are not perfect - many operators did not record the type of launch, the number of occupants, the number of aerobatic flights, etc., they just recorded hours and flights. So any evaluation based on usage pattern will be quite subjective, and the evaluators will probably want to be very conservative. And developing a definitive inspection/testing procedure will be expensive.

For a more detailed history of these events, visit https://sites.google.com/site/blanikspar

Dual thermal flight over the Tehachapi Valley

2010-09-06T15:54:00.001-07:00

Sunday afternoon we spent an hour or so troubleshooting an electrical problem in the PW5, and cleaning it out. This morning we put it in the trailer so it can be repositioned to another gliderport for the fall and winter.

I also got my Official Observer to sign my Silver duration forms so I can send them in to the SSA. We've each been traveling, so I hadn't seen him since my flight on July 4.

This morning I helped N prep and launch the Grob 103 for two instructional flights. Now he has been "signed off" to fly the Grob from the rear seat. Our club requires signoffs for different aircraft, seats, and locations, beyond what the FAA requires, in order to enhance safety and learning. After his second flight, I jumped into the front and we took off at 12:44. N did the takeoff, and I did the landing.

There were very few gliders up today, probably because originally the forecast was not so great. (Also, I think a lot of pilots use the last day of the holiday weekend to drive home if they live far away.) I think we thermalled with one and saw only one other.

We let off over the mountains at 8200' MSL and went back to where we had seen lift, but could not connect. We tried some ridge lift (wind was from the east) but it wasn't strong enough and we made our way back to the valley.

Fortunately we connected with decent thermals which twice took us back up to 7000-7500 feet. Not high enough to go exploring - even to the end of the valley - but high enough to have some fun. There was some other spotty lift which may have been a north-south convergence line but was not very organized. Once when we got high enough I tried for anabatic lift over the lowest ridge of the mountains, but it was not working well enough for me to turn and climb the next ridge.

So we came back and landed on 9L at one hour and 14 minutes. Landing from this direction enables us to roll right up to our tie-down, avoiding a long push in the heat.

Huh. As I'm writing this, a glider just took off to the west. Today was the only day in which the wind reversed itself. Some days it reverses many times and we need to push the lined-up gliders back and forth to reverse takeoff direction.

Look at my three posts from this weekend, and you'll see that the conditions and best flying locations were different each day. One thing for sure - flying at Tehachapi requires you to learn flexibility! I'm very pleased to have had good flights (if not very ambitious ones) all three days. A total of 5:18 in the air, but I can only log half of the dual flights as PIC time.

Shear line soaring

2010-09-05T21:56:00.001-07:00

The NWS forecast called for winds gusting to 45 MPH so we thought we'd get shut down, but they never came. Just the usual moderate west winds, which actually can make for decent soaring in the valley. The wind enters the Tehachapi valley from the west around two sides of a mountain, and the colliding winds set up a convergence, commonly called a "shear line". I've tried to work it before but never had much luck.

Today another pilot wanted to fly dual with me in the Grob 103. We don't have an instructor this trip, so the newer pilots pair up with more experienced pilots and learn about flying this location, or get experience in the Grob, or whatever. T had had some flights in the Grob but is not signed off to fly it yet. He flew from the front and I from the back as PIC. Since I'm still working on becoming an instructor, it's good experience for both of us.

We released at 2800' AGL (7000 MSL) and fairly promptly found a thermal that took us up to nearly 8000 MSL. That seemed to be the top of the lift all day, both shear and thermal. We went back and forth and usually found narrow bands of lift along a northwest-southeast line. Often it was too narrow to circle in, so it was apparently mostly shear line. At times we could fly directly upwind and still gain altitude. That sounds like a really odd thing to be able to do without an engine, huh? But if the wind is coming at you and colliding with wind from another angle, it deflects upward and takes you up! Kind of magical.

We traded off flying from time to time. There were three or four other gliders in the area, and we all followed each other to the lifting areas. We saw a grass fire start and get put out a few minutes later, and observed how the wind carried the smoke different directions at different altitudes. Wind shear made visible!

We used soaring ravens to find lift, and we came within a hundred feet or so of a hawk, which quickly turned and dived away from us. It was brownish on top and black-and-white underneath, which in my bird book looks like a Rough-Legged Hawk. I'm still hoping to encounter an eagle in flight some time.

Eventually we got a bit tired and ran out of drinking water, so we came down after 2 hours and 8 minutes.

Mountain and valley flight at Tehachapi

2010-09-04T20:30:00.001-07:00

I took off at 1:37 in the club's PW5. I let off at 3900' AGL (8100 MSL) in what I thought was good lift. I had to go back and search for it a bit, but soon I was climbing. That first thermal took me up to over 10,000. There were 4 or 5 gliders over the mountains, and we all used each others as markers for usable lift. I flew with BT, KMA, and Blue J at various time.

I had put my Li-On backup battery pack into the PW5 because the club's gel cell battery seemed to be discharged. I found that mine ran the instruments OK but I could not transmit well on the radio, and switched to my portable. I guess I should get a gel cell as a better backup - they're not that expensive.

We found that there was not much thermal lift but instead there seemed to be a convergence line along the top of the mountains. It was bumpy but worked well. The highest I got was 10,900 MSL, which is just about what the RUC forecast and Dr. Jack predicted.

I was able to use my oxygen tank with the ship's EDS system, which I had not been able to do the last couple of times. I think Greg replaced the O-ring on the regulator, and now it doesn't leak anymore. It's very cool - comes on automatically at 10,000 MSL.

Eventually I headed out toward Bear Mt. and a tour around the valley. As expected, I found no more significant lift. There was a little over the recent burn area, but not enough to work. So I eventually came back in, finishing up at just under two hours. My landing was really good and I rolled right up to where our other glider was parked. Actually the wind gets partial credit. Once the PW5 slows down, its tiny rudder doesn't let you override the tendency to "weathervane" into the wind. But it was just what I needed to roll off the right side of the runway.

All in all, a nice flight, if not very ambitious. Had I gotten up to 11,000 consistently, I could have headed north, but it just wasn't that strong.

Tonight my trailer is full of things being recharged: main battery, backup battery, PDA, and handheld radio.

Track of my 5-hour glider flight

2010-08-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

Here's what a 5-hour flight that doesn't go anywhere looks like. It's not very sharp at this size, so click on it for a full-size image.

Wings Off, Wings On

2010-08-02T18:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the real world intrudes on our pleasant hobby of flying aircraft without engines. Two aspects of the real world presented themselves recently. 1:We fly real aircraft with real risks. 2:We operate a geographically dispersed glider club, not an central operation.

In late June, we got word that the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) had initiated an action regarding Blanik L13 gliders. Seems there was a crash somewhere in Europe in which a wing separated from the glider, and metal fatigue was a possible factor. (It's also possible that improper aerobatics overstressed the wing joint, but the final report has not been issued.) The manufacturer Aircraft Industries a.s. (which we know as LET) issued inspection instructions and limitations on aerobatics, to be carried out immediately. As of that date, the FAA had not issued any Airworthiness Directive.

Wings Off! Our club operates two Blanik L13's, so any grounding would put a halt to our training activities. The club sprang into action, getting copies of the instructions and gathering a crew to take off the wings to perform the inspection. I won't dare say "I told you so", but some of us mentioned that the FAA's instructions, if and when eventually issued, might differ from the EASA's, but being proactive seemed a good thing. On a Saturday morning, the crew took the wings off and an IA followed the EASA's instructions and documented the results. No fatigue found! Wings On!

About three weeks later, the FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive. The inspection instructions were basically the same, but specified using a more precise method which we had not known to use the first time around, so the previous inspection is not acceptable. Wings Off! We borrowed the appropriate equipment for the IA to do the inspection again, and rounded up a crew again. (It takes about 4-5 people about an hour to take them off and put them on again.) No fatigue found! Wings On!

The EASA and FAA directives both included a reporting requirement: they want to know the service and damage history of all L13's, to help determine whether usage limits or further inspection requirements might be required, and to help determine if and when to lift or revise the limitations on aerobatics. Filling out the required report means going through all the logbooks looking for damage entries, and looking for dates and serial numbers of any major replacements. Here's where the dispersed nature of our club comes into play. Since being displaced from Hemet, the Maintenance Officer keeps the most recent logbooks for all aircraft, and the Secretary keeps the club archives, which includes the old logbooks. This request came in when the Secretary (me) was on a week-long business trip, so getting the old info had to wait. The old logbooks revealed certain minor damage and repairs to be reported on the form. Scanning the most recent logbooks, the MO find that the wings were replaced some years ago on one ship, before we owned it. The serial numbers of the new wings were not recorded in the logbook, and can only be determined by looking inside the wings. Would have been nice to know this before either of the previous two wing inspections. (I'm guilty as well... I saw that on the form, but had no idea the wings had ever been replaced. So once again, it will be Wings Off, Wings On...

Short flights under cloudy skies

2010-08-01T20:44:00.000-07:00

Southern California has been having an unusually cool summer. We usually have "June Gloom" which means a thick layer of clouds extends inland from the coast and doesn't burn off until midday. This year it started in mid-May and continued off and on through most of July, with only one hot week so far. Saturday's forecast was for scattered cirrus, but over Elsinore there was a layer of cloud that was almost thick enough to be called stratus, at about 11,000 feet, which blocked a lot of the sunlight. The temperatures aloft and a forecast inversion indicated that lift would only go to about 5,000' at most even if got hot on the ground.

It was hot, in the mid-90's F, and humid for our area. I flew at 12:30 and got about 25 minutes. I let off at 4300' MSL and got lift up to about 4700'. The lift was probably partly thermal, but it was narrow enough that I began to suspect light ridge lift. The wind was from the southeast, which is unusual for that site, so I tried working the ridges that faced that wind. Didn't find much, but it was fun to try.

Another fellow flew at 13:30 and got about 35 minutes. The cloud layer retreated about 2:00-2:30 but none of us were motivated enough to try it again. I stayed for most of the afternoon helping to launch and retrieve the gliders, and talking with the student pilots and their parents.

INTERdependence Day

2010-07-06T22:40:00.000-07:00

Monday's conditions were even better than Sunday's. Winds were predicted to be light, thermals of 600-700 fpm up to 13,000' MSL in the Tehachapi area and higher to the north, with some possibility of cumulus clouds. Since I dominated the PW5 yesterday, I was not planning to fly today, but other club members were planning some moderate cross-country flights.

One of the interesting things about soaring is that although most of one's flying is done solo or at most in pairs, it's still a group activity. A soaring club is a cooperative group that works together to help each other learn to fly, to fly for fun and experience, and to expand their knowledge and skill. Stephen Covey says "Interdependence is a higher value than independence," and a soaring club is a great example of how working together can lift everyone a little higher. Here are just a few of the ways we all helped each other and learned from each other throughout this weekend:

C and R showed P and M some of the local landout sites.
M helped L put the wings on his ship.
L and M repaired a broken battery wire while R prepared to fly.
R installed a connector on an oxygen mask hose while P and M waited in line to launch.
L filled the O2 tank while C prepared to fly.
R charged the batteries for both ships overnight.
P took M on his first high-altitude glider flight - also his first cross-country flight - also his longest flight - and boosted M's interest in soaring after some frustrating delays in training.
We all pushed and pulled the gliders from one end of the runway to the other when the wind shifted direction... twice...
R showed P how to use the new Borgelt B400 vario in the Grob 103.
C loaned his van to pilots' wives for activities in town.
R loaned his truck to L to haul equipment around.
J loaned his multimeter to L for some testing.
R showed C how to use the memory mode on the PW5 radio.
L loaned his tools for various repairs.
R loaned P his radio charger.
All members and their wives pitched in for some delicious dinners.

And so on and so on.

C got a 2.5 hour flight to over 14,000 feet. P and M got a 3-hour flight out over Kelso Valley and back. L went farther and faster but had to return due to an oxygen system failure. J and B and D and others had fun flights into the southern Sierras. A very successful weekend trip!

Independence Day - 5 hour flight!

2010-07-06T21:37:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning's weather was much better than Saturday's. The forecast was for relatively calm winds, top of the boundary layer at 11-12,000 feet, strong thermals, but no CU possible. I planned to get an early start to try for a five-hour flight. While I prepped the plane, a couple of the guys repaired a broken battery wire. I was shooting for an 11:00 launch, but actually took off at 11:15 and released from tow in lift at 11:23. I immediately made a 360-degree turn to "notch" the flight trace on the Volkslogger (this enables the flight reviewer to see when you departed from the tow plane).

Thermals were present but not really strong right away. I used a combination of thermal and anabatic lift to get up to around 9,300' and stayed there for quite some time. (If you're not familiar with anabatic lift, search my previous articles and you'll find some descriptions. It's really amazing when it's working!) Over the next hour or so, the thermals off the mountain tops got stronger, up to 10,000' and ultimately over 11,000' MSL.

I had made a decision that my priority was simply a 5-hour flight duration, and that I would not go cross-country. Here's why: let's say I was between landout sites when the lift started to taper off, and I had to choose to head to a safe landing site at 4 and a half hours. That would defeat the purpose of the duration flight. I have not had enough XC flights to have a lot of confidence in pressing forward looking for lift. By staying within gliding distance of the airport, I would have a better chance of staying up as long as the lift would keep me. Boring, perhaps, but I don't get many chances to have the plane to myself all day in good conditions.

I had a few mechanical/electrical problems. The variometer in the PW5 is not showing lift correctly and overstating sink. I relied on my clip-on audio vario, and the simulated vario on my PDA/GPS, and of course the seat of my pants. The vario seemed to get better later in the flight, so maybe we have some dirt in the lines or something. My PDA lost its GPS feed from the Volkslogger and I had to reset it. The second time it did that, I switched it over to my plug-in GPS instead. But it still kept shutting itself down - I think a power-saving setting is turned on. Eventually I figured that out and just made sure to tap something on the screen every 3o minutes or so. And in that mode it didn't leave a "trace" on the screen, which is handy for getting back to thermals. I couldn't find the menu setting to fix that without looking down for too long, so I gave up on it. That's an item to add to my checklist: verify all the important PDA settings, especially since I had restored the software a while back.

Physically, the flight was not too taxing. I know, lots of people have made much longer flights, but my previous longest was less than 3 hours. There's very little room to stretch and move about in a glider cockpit! My shoulder got sore after an hour or so, so I varied my grip and flew left-handed for a while. One foot went to sleep a couple times, so I let out the pedals a bit. I thought my back would get sore, but it really wasn't bad. I took along a couple of trail mix bars and munched on them a couple hours apart. I didn't really get bored. I went to a few different mountains and ridges... I took some pictures... sometimes there were other gliders to thermal with. I experimented with very slow flight into the wind (a technique I read about recently and want to try out some more). I checked in with the ground every hour. And of course I had the PDA gremlins to keep me busy.

About 4 and a half hours into the flight, it was all looking good. I was still between 9 and 10 thousand feet, and it can take 20 minutes or so to get from 9,000' down to the airport at 4,200. But promptly at 4:00, the lift machine shut down, at least on the north side of the mountains where I needed to be to glide back to Mountain Valley. The tops of the mountains were now getting too close, and I had to move down to lower peaks. Based on the wind direction, I tried some ridge soaring when the thermals were nowhere to be found. I tried all of the lower peaks, but they were no longer working, and soon I was over the valley with - maybe - enough altitude to stretch it out to five hours. I needed to make it to 4:23 p.m. I made sure to stay upwind of the airport. I heard a couple of blips on the vario, and tried a turn or two, but whatever lift was under me was pretty weak. By the time I entered the pattern I was at about 5 hours and 2 minutes after release. I landed at 5 hours and 4 minutes after release - way too close! (Total flight time was 5:15.)

A couple of the guys from the club came out to meet me and pointed to their watches trying to convince me I had miscalculated and landed an hour early. Nice try, guys! When one of them wanted to help me take off the parachute, I knew something was up. They've always owed me a soaking, since they didn't toss a bucket of water on me after my first solo flight. But to my surprise I got a shower of champagne, for the first time in my life! (By the way, that was a sticky mess to wash off the glider the next morning.)

Unfortunately, it appears this flight may not qualify for my Silver duration. I mis-read, or misunderstood, or forgot about the rule regarding altitude loss. I won't get into it all here, but I may have to do this again for it to count. If so, I'll do it as a cross-country flight, now that I know I can do a long-duration flight. I know I did the best I could with this day's conditions: had I taken off earlier, or let off lower, the lift would not have been there. And I worked every bit of lift I could find right up to the end. So whether this qualifies for the Silver or not, I did have a 5-hour flight and learned a few things.

Here's a a big thank-you to the club members who helped me out, and who let me have the ship for the whole day, and celebrated with me when I landed!

Independence Day weekend at Tehachapi - Saturday

2010-07-04T08:15:00.000-07:00

Several of us are at Tehachapi (Mountain Valley Airport) for the holiday weekend. We'd planned to keep the PW5 and the Grob 103 tied down here for the summer, available for anyone who wants to come up for a weekend. Unfortunately it was fairly windy (not so much as to be dangerous, but enough to tear up the thermals), so that's where they stayed on Saturday - tied down.

A couple of the club members had never been to any of the well-known landout sites to the north of here, so four of us got in my truck and visited several of them. It's very helpful to see a site from the ground and get an idea of the landmarks, obstacles, slope, ground access etc.
First up was Cantil, a broad empty field right off the paved road. It looks really good, and it's nice to have another site now that the Honda Track access road is closed.

We stopped briefly at Wide Spot, and all agreed it's useless as a landing site. It was always marginal, and now there's a big sign at the north end. So cross this one off the list.

Brad's Landing Place was next. This is a concrete-covered aqueduct a few miles off the paved road. We checked out two or three different roads in to it and found that the road right next to Robber's Roost is the easiest and shortest. We also found a secodn section of the aqueduct that also looks landable. I'll measure it on Google Earth and compare it to the section already documented.

We visited Inyokern airport and met some of the glider and tow pilots there.

Cinder Cone dry lake is a nice long lake, very smooth. It would be possible to aerotow from it. The road in is a bit rocky.

Coso Junction dry lake is also very smooth, and the road in is shorter and smoother. Both Cinder Cone and Coso currently have wind socks.

Maps show an airstrip on the other side of the highway from Coso Junction, so we checked it out. It's really just a field, and appears to be on private property. We don't think it's usable.

Sunday has started out nearly calm, so I'm hoping it will turn out to be soarable.

Tehachapi Day 3 - Mystery Partly Solved

2010-05-31T22:28:00.000-07:00

Very few people flying today, so hard to tell if anyone stayed up. It was a bit breezier but not bad. Conditions didn't look good for a retry of my long flight for Silver. I dawdled trying to decide whether to try to fly shear line (due to the wind) or wait for it to heat up. Someone asked me, "What's that little box on your hat?" I replied that it is a mini audio variometer which I can use if the one in the ship fails (or in Blaniks that don't have built-in audio varios.) She asked me, "Do they fail often?" I said no, but I had the whole battery fail once (the PW5 has no pneumatic-only vario), and I had definitely used it then. (See my first Dust Devil Dash post.)

One club member stayed up about a half hour, working shear line lift at about 6000' MSL, so I figured I'd at least give it a try. As I was pushing out, he came back, which was not a great sign.

During the tow, I noticed the vario needle swinging wildly, something I had seen yesterday but attributed to the bumps we flew through. I let off at 3000' AGL, well upwind, where I thought I would start hunting for shear line (convergence) lift. But something wasn't right. I was seeing sink on the vario, but it didn't feel like I was sinking nor was the altimeter unwinding. I thought to turn on my clip-on electronic vario and sure enough, it beeped to indicate lift. I also checked the "Vario" number on the display of my PDA/GPS, and it showed "up" as well. (Not sure if it's calculated from GPS info, or fed from the pressure sensor in the Volkslogger.)

So I had conclusive proof that the vario or the pneumatic system that drives it was faulty. Yesterday's terrible flights were not entirely my fault. Thinking I was in sink, I sped up to try to get out of it, which only made things worse, since the PW5's polar curve drops off pretty steeply with speed. I had slowed down to minimum sink speed a couple of times to try to reduce the drag and see if I was fooling myself, but maybe at those times I really was in sink, because it didn't help. I don't know why I didn't think of checking against the other vario and the GPS yesterday - I guess I believed the instrument too much.

I ignored the bad instruments and flew by feel and by my clip-on vario. I found some moderate lift and then a halfway decent thermal. I worked it back up to 7100' MSL, nearly my release altitude. I couldn't seem to get higher than that. I don't think it was shear line lift, because it was wide enough to circle in pretty consistently. I left it in search of other lift, but kept coming back to it to "tank up". Eventually I went downwind to circle under another glider that was higher than me, but that didn't work out and I came back for a landing after 33 minutes. I didn't care that it was fairly short - I had solved yesterday's mystery and successfully worked the lift on a not-so-great day. (And I experimented with another way of working lift in wind, but that's a story for another blog post.)

My landing on runway 27R was terrific - really smooth touchdown, and I worked hard to get a very long straight rollout with a light gusty wind about 40 degrees off my nose. That's tricky in the PW5, with its non-castering wheels and tiny rudder. The runway was completely clear so I was able to roll all the way to the west end, and use the favorable crosswind to roll off gently, wings level, into the dirt right in front of my tie-down spot. Nice!

Back on the ground, another club member and I worked on diagnosing the problem. To make a long story short, we found a kink in the Total Energy probe line, and think it's pinched or caught somewhere under the cockpit floor. Another member who's staying over at Tehachapi is going to pull the floor and look for problems.

Tehachapi Day 2 - Skunked Twice

2010-05-30T16:28:00.001-07:00

My plan for today was to try for a very long local flight in the PW5, if weather conditions were favorable. I need a 5 hour flight to complete my Silver badge, and this was the first opprtunity where the glider availability, my preparation, and the weather might all come together. It looked possible according to the forecasts and models, with decent lift as high as 10,000' in the Tehachapi area (but not very far north), and light winds from the east: up to 15 knots on the ground, but only about 5 aloft. I planned to stay local if possible - I didn't see any reason to complicate the goal by going cross-country.

For a long flight like that, I made sure to take plenty of water, some snacks, fully charged battery, and a full oxygen tank. I planned to take off by about 11:30. A few other gliders launced before me, but no one had yet stayed up very long. I took off to the west (runway 27) at 11:15. I thought the tow pilot would take me over the mountains, but instead he took me over the valley upwind of the airport. The vario was all over the place - way up and way down. We encountered some lift, and I let off at 3100' AGL. I did a tight circle to "notch" the flight trace and to work the lift. Nothing but sink everywhere I went. I couldn't get up over the mountains so I tried to explore the valley. The sink was anywhere from 6 to 10 knots. Very soon I was forced to land, I think after 13 minutes.

I pushed the glider aside to think about the conditions and see if anyone else was staying up. Soon there was a line of about 8 waiting to launch. I was advised to try to get away from the valley and head north, that by this time of day often the thermals die off. This time I asked to go over the mountains, as I felt the chances were better there because I could see a couple of gliders. I took off to the east at 12:25. At 3000' AGL there was nothing. I held out until 3800' and let off in some lift. Again, I could not get back into the lift. I tried the bald spot - nothing. I tried the ridges, looking for anabatic lift (unlikely) or orographic (more likely). Sink over the foothills. Sink over the valley. At 2000' AGL I found one weak little thermal that I worked for quite a while but it only gave me 100'. This flight only lasted 27 minutes.

Another pilot took off in the PW5 at 2:07 and stayed up for two hours and reached 11,700' MSL. And some guys went up at 2:00 in the Grob and got 90 minutes. So I guess I was just unlucky.

Tehachapi Day 1

2010-05-29T20:34:00.001-07:00

Several club members are at Tehachapi with the Grob 103 and PW5. I spent the morning and early afternoon doing maintenance on the Grob and figuring out the new Borgelt vario in it.

One club member brought a friend who wanted to go for a ride. We took off and let off in good lift. Although I caution newbies about thermal flight (see May 9), he wanted the whole experience, so I worked it for a while, gaining 900 feet pretty quickly. The view of the desert was spectacular! Although I kept to 30 degree banks, he did get queasy so I straightened out and cruised around over the mountains. We encountered two other gliders thermaling together but did not join them. I was able to fly through little bits of lift without circling, but eventually had to go out over the valley.

My passenger was feeling uncomfortable - said his hands were going to sleep - so I pulled the spoilers and brought us down. There was a bit of crosswind which made the last bit of final approach interesting, but it was not too bad. The runway was clear so we were able roll all the way to our tiedown area. Total flight time was 28 minutes.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even better conditions. If all goes well, I'm going to attempt a 5 hour flight in the PW5 to complete my Silver badge. My longest flight so far was about 2:50 I think. I won't go very far from the airport - probably just around and around the valley. The goal is to stay up, avoiding sink, not to do a cross-country flight over variable terrain I've already completed the distance and altitude requirements. I'll take along food, lots of water, oxygen, and the Volkslogger for proof. Music would be nice!

Landout / survival kit

2010-05-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

At our club meeting yesterday, I led a discussion about landout & survival kits, and opened up my kit to show one can look like. The idea is that when you're engaging in cross-country soaring, there are several scenarios that could place you in the wilderness on your own for some time, so you should take along some gear to make your stay more comfortable... or even survivable. And even on our "local" flights, we go over some fairly remote areas of the Santa Ana Mountains. A bailout or crash there could mean a long walk or an overnight stay. My kit is full of stuff I'll probably never need, but it's all so small and light that I decided it's worth including I take the kit along on nearly every flight in the PW5.

There are three scenarios I can think of where landout/survival gear would come in handy:

A routine, safe land out on a remote airstrip, dry lake bed, or other flat place in the desert or mountains. Even if the crew knows where you are, if it's late in the day, you may be staying overnight. In this case, you and the glider and the kit are together. Landout gear is important to protect the glider. Survival gear can make you more comfortable, first aid gear is probably not needed.
A survivable crash. These happen... pilots fly into trees or get forced down by mountain downdrafts. Rescue can take some time. In this case, you probably have access to the kit. Landout gear is not important, but first aid supplies might be, along with survival gear.
A bailout, due to collision or mechanical failure. You may or may not land close to the glider and your kit, so in this case your "survival kit" includes whatever minimal stuff is on your person, and your parachute and whatever's attached to it.

There are lots of resources on the web and in books and magazines to help you select landout and survival gear for your kit, so I won't go into the "why" for any of this stuff. If you have any questions or comments, please post a reply.

All this stuff fits into a single cloth bag which fits under/behind the seat in the PW5. It would just as easily fit in the cargo area behind the rear seat in our Blanik L13 or Grob 103. It weighs 4 pounds (of which 1 whole pound is a windbreaker jacket) and takes up 0.4 cubic feet. I started with a survival kit and a first aid kit I bought at a sporting goods store. I added tent stakes and ropes (the "landout" part), a flashlight, some granola bars, and personal items such as contact lenses.

I always wear "cargo" pants which provide some additional pockets. I should get a very small bag which fits into a leg pocket, and transfer some of the very small essential stuff into to cover the bailout scenario. There are also small packs that can strap onto a parachute, and I should look into that as well. On one side of the chute I strap my Personal Locator Beacon, but there's room on the other strap.

Here's the list of what's currently in my bag:

Main bag
Stakes - 2
Ropes - 3
LED flashlight
Windbreaker (stuffed in quart Ziploc bag)

Waterproof bag - commercial survival kit
Small multitool
Light stick
Bright vinyl tape
Fire starting sticks - 2
Candle - heat-resistant
Tie-wraps - 2
Space blanket
Poncho
Pad of paper
Tape strips
Plastic bag
Whistle

Smaller Bag
Chemical pocket warmer
CD for signal mirror
Batteries for flashlight
Space blanket
Sunscreen packets - 2
Wipe packets - 3
Vinyl tape
Contact lenses
Chapstick
Eye drops
Trail mix bars – 3

Little stuff in Ziploc Bag
Waterproof matches
Compass
Salt
Golf pencil
Quarters
$20 bill
Nylon rope
String
Thread
Needle
Safety pins
Razor blades
Fishing line

First Aid Kit - store-bought
Gauze pads - 2
Non-adherent pads - 2
Various adhesive bandages - 12
Tape strips - 2
Alcohol pads - 4
Iodine pads - 2
Sting pads - 2
Antibiotic ointment - 2
Advil - 8
First aid pamphlet
Gauze strip
More band-aids and alcohol pads

Milestones

2010-05-23T19:16:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just noticed that I've written 250 blog posts since starting this blog in 2005.

Coincidentally, I recently logged my 250th glider flight (in March). I started flight training in April 2003.

An ideal intro flight

2010-05-09T09:29:00.000-07:00

A longtime friend is visiting from out of state, and she wants to go for a glider flight. She's not exactly the adventurous type, so I'm a little surprised, but I'm always glad when a friend is interested. A first-time glider flight, especially for someone who isn't already a pilot or looking to become one, is kind of a balancing act for the pilot. I want them to have fun, with no motion sickness, but I also want it to be longer than just a "sled ride" and for them to experience soaring upward in lift. But working lift often involves steep turns which can be scary and induce motion sickness. So the question is always: to glide or to soar? To take off early when it's smooth but soaring isn't likely, or to wait until the thermals start but it can be bumpy?

Saturday's weather looked promising, with clear skies, mid-80's, no cloud cover, and moderate lift forecast: 3 knots of lift to about 5,300' MSL. We got to the airport early in case I had to wash and/or preflight the Blanik, or in case a number of us decided to assemble the second Blanik (still on the trailer after our winching trip). As it turned out, another member had washed it, and he and a new student did the preflight, and there weren't enough members to assemble the other one, so we ended up with a lot of time. The instructor had three students for the day, and some paperwork to do with them, so we decided I would take my passenger up first. After waiting in line for a couple ships, we took off at 11:37, pretty early for any thermal activity.

The takeoff was a bit slow and the climb-out was a LOT slow. Usually we climb to about 400-500 feet and turn south, but this time we kept going straight out over the lake and were only 300-350 feet AGL. Had we had a rope break there, we would have made it back to flat open land but probably not to the actual runway. I decided to hang in there and we eventually climbed normally up over the mountains. Later I talked with the tow pilot and he said we seemed to go through area of sinking air. Plus we had a tailwind instead of the usual headwind, so all together it made for a very flat flight path. Once we got onto the southbound leg over the hills, we started getting some turbulence which I hoped would indicate lift. My passenger was enjoying it so far.

As we approached 3000' AGL over the mountains we got into some lift. Between the towplane climbing and the lifting air, it was nearly 1000 feet per minute up, and it continued for several seconds, so I pulled off and turned into it. What luck! It was pretty strong, up to about 300-400 fpm at times, and very broad. Whether it was thermal or convergence, it was big. I was able to stay in it with about a 15-degree bank. That was the best of both worlds: a gentle bank for my passenger's first glider flight, and lift to keep us up for a while. We took that up about 800 feet very easily (to 5,100 feet, very close to the thermal forecast). With nearly 4000' in the tank, we could afford to fly around and enjoy the view. Although the tow plane went by once with a Schweizer, we never saw them again - we had the whole sky to ourselves. We never hit any serious sink, and we found 1 to 3 knots of lift occasionally, so it was a pretty relaxing flight. Jody was enjoying the flight, and the lift we found after that first boomer was weaker, and I didn't want to push it by trying to aggressively work the smaller thermals.

So I eventually turned back after about 35 minutes - I knew we had student pilots waiting to get in the air. Of course, as I started the 45-degree leg we encountered more lift and I had to use spoilers on the downwind leg to get us down. My landing was smooth and the rollout was nice, although I had to hold a fair amount of right rudder and aileron to keep aligned - that tailwind had turned a bit and was now about 30 degrees off our nose, but gentle. We rolled all the way up for an easy pushback, and ended up with a 43-minute total flight.

That strong and wide lift at 11:45 in the morning was really amazing, and made for a terrific guest flight that was long enough to be fun.

Winch weekend - Day 3 - PW5 PTT x2

2010-04-26T22:06:00.000-07:00

Today several of us plan to fly the PW5. After preflighting it, I spend some time with private pilots M and S explaining the features of the Borgelt B50 computer and the MicroAir radio. We also spend some time with the winch launching section of the PW5 manual. Important points include adjusting the seat position and the trim according to the pilot's weight. S is heavier than M or me... one concern we have is that with lighter pilots, the way the wheels and the CG hook are arranged, it's quite possible that the moment of acceleration could cause the cockpit to rotate up and the tail boom to slam down. The manual has some advice on how to hold the stick.

And then there's this interesting comment: "During the steep climb the stick forces are of small value." Some winching experts have pointed out that stable gliders tend to climb at the angle that is the most efficient, i.e. the horizontal stabilizer will tend to orient the wings directly into the relative wind to achieve stability, and so the angle of attack and speed will tend to become optimized. They claim you can unhand the stick and a stable glider will climb well on its own. (I won't try that for quite a while!) The PW5's elevator is really small compared to the wings and the horizontal stabilizer, so it can't override the orienting effect. More on that later.

We set up today on the main runway, launching to the west due to the wind direction. We get an earlier start, which is good for practicing, but it also means the lift isn't working for the first few flights. A visiting glider pilot (not a member) wants to go for a ride, so I go up with him in the Blanik (me in front, him in back). He's been a winch launch passenger once before, so it's not all new to him. We get a good launch, but with no headwind and since I'm not terribly aggressive in the climb yet, we only get up to 900' AGL. We turn left to look for lift, but we get into 5 knot sink right away, so essentially we have to turn back and never get out of the pattern. We come in for a good landing and roll right up to the launching point. Fun, but short. No one else was finding more than 1-2 knots of lift this early in the day, so I don't think we had much of a chance for a longer flight anyway.

Later in the day I set up for a flight in the PW5. As expected, the tail boom comes down, but not very hard. If this winch was as aggressive in the first two seconds as the OCSA winch is, this rotation could be an issue. Once I get off the ground, I get into a slight PIO (which means "pilot-induced oscillation", pitching up and down due to not controlling perfectly). It's not much as PIO's go, and only lasts for about two cycles. But as I mentioned yesterday, if you don't pitch up at least a little bit right away to present a load on the cable, you can overrun it. My two seconds of horizontal flight getting out of the PIO is too long, and I see the parachute slip below me to the left, so I release just before someone on the radio calls "abort, abort". I make a safe and smooth landing on the right side of the runway (to avoid the cable), and roll out about two thirds of the way down toward the winch. This is what we call a "PTT" or "Premature Termination of Tow". It's a long walk back with the glider behind the truck.

After a few Blanik launches and our club pres in his PIK, I'm up again in the PW5. This time my takeoff is smooth and I rotate up and start a pretty good climb. Someone on the radio calls to the winch driver "more power, more power". Before long my airspeed is 67 and flirting with 70 knots. The maximum allowed according to the manual is 65, so I start pulling back to try to adjust the speed (forgetting for a moment the statement "During the steep climb the stick forces are of small value."). Probably my next move would be to call for less speed, but suddenly the speed drops off and I hear/feel the cable release. Bummer - PTT #2. Hmmm... I can't see the chute or the line by this time, but I can't imagine that I overran it at this angle. But there's no time to analyze it: I'm at 400' AGL. That's high enough to turn around for a downwind landing, so that's what I plan to do. I have had a rope break at 300' during auto-towing solo in a Blanik, so I've done this before.

I nose over and ensure I have flying speed. There was very little crosswind when I took off, so it doesn't matter much which way I go. Since the normal pattern is left-hand, I turn left and do a 270-degree turn and get lined up on the runway. Hmmm... The next Blanik is already lined up at the launching point. I know that when you have a PTT from an auto-tow or winch launch, where you go up steeply, you can't really land in the distance available back to the starting point. You would have to descend at the same 40+ degree angle you went up at, and that's not likely in a slippery glass ship. Maybe in a Blanik with flaps and a big slip, but not in this glider. Hmmm... passing over the launching point to the other end of the runway is not an option either, because our pres is landing his PIK there. There's a nice wide taxiway, just as long as the runway, so that's the obvious choice. Since I'm already lined up on the runway, I S-turn to the left and line up again. There's nothing in the way, and I make a nice smooth landing and roll to a stop about 100 feet beyond the launching point. No problem. But there's no way I could have landed back on the runway without overrunning the launch point. It's nice to have options!

So far today I have employed two of the three PTT landing procedures.

I discuss the flight with S, and can't quite figure out why it released. People on the ground thought my climb angle looked good. My slight pulling up and backing off on the stick to adjust the speed shouldn't have dropped the line very much. I'd be ready to go again after a waiting for Blanik or two to launch. But then the winch guys call in on the radio: we're done for the day due to a failed universal joint. Later on I see the U-joint pieces in the hangar - an old repair failed and it spun itself apart. That occurred during my launch, so now at least I know the cause of the sudden power loss and back-release.

By now it's 2:00 in the afternoon, so we break for lunch and tear down the gliders... and change a flat tire on one of the trailers. It was fun while it lasted, but the lift was weaker than expected so no one really "got away" today. The last of us leave the airport about 6:00. Hot and dusty, and grateful to the host club, we drive off into the sunset.

Winch weekend - Day 2 - Lots of Flights

2010-04-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

The weather yesterday included some small cumulus clouds indicating that there's some moisture left over from last week's storm. I'm hoping that will stick around, since today (Saturday) is supposed to be even warmer. It doesn't turn out that way. There are some decent thermals, and a few pilots get away from the airport and get up to about 6,000 MSL or so. But it's all "blue", meaning no clouds to mark the thermals. And they seem to be strong enough to work if you're about 1,000 feet or so AGL. But most of our focus today is on winch training, refining techniques, and a few guest rides. We haven't done any winching for a few months, so even those who have sign-offs like to go up once with an instructor.

We interleave our flights with those of the local club; they're flying a Schweizer 2-22 and a Blanik L13 like ours. We set up on a north-south runway that's about 3000' or so long. In theory you could get to about 1,500', and I think several flights achieved 1,200 to 1,300. It depends on how steeply the pilot climbs, which is somewhat dependent on experience. It also depends on the winch providing the right speed at the right time, which is partly experience on the part of the winch driver, partly the power and smoothness of the engine and transmission, and partly ESP. The winch is so far away, I don't think they can really see how the glider is doing. More modern winches have a "constant tension" mechanism which smooths this out, but our clubs don't have such devices.

I have had a winch signoff for some time, and have flown several flights with instructors since then, but have not had the opportunity to launch either solo or as PIC without a CFI. Another pilot and I take one of the early launches, with me doing the flying from the front seat. The launch goes well, but I'm not very aggressive with my climb angle, so we only get to 700' AGL. That's not really enough altitude to go hunting for a thermal, so I turn back toward the starting point, intending to make an abbreviated pattern unless we stumble into something really good. But we get right into bad sink instead, and really soon we're down to 400' AGL and not in a great position for a standard pattern. I work out kind of a base leg without losing too much altitude, and then as I get lined up for final, we're in some lift. So I find myself at about 400', midfield, and needing to slip off altitude to land in the second half of the runway. The Blanik slips well, so I get it down and stopped but slightly into the dirt overrun at the end of the runway. (One thing none of us realized until later is that the last few hundred feet of the runway is downhill a bit, so that doesn't help with the stopping.)

Now that I have had time to think about it, if a launch is less than "pattern altitude" it might be best to just stay right around the release point of the runway looking for lift. That way if it doesn't pan out you could just turn around into a final approach. The turnaround time for the winch cable is such that no one will be taking off right away to create a conflict.

My next flight is with our CFI. This launch my angle is a bit more aggressive, and we get up to 1000' AGL before it back-releases. We snoop around and find some decent lift (up to 700 feet per minute at times) that takes us up another 1300' or so. We're not really looking to get away, just work on the launch and landing, so when the lift doesn't take us up very high we come back in about 15 minutes.

Late in the day, of the other pilots S is ready to try the PW5. The first launch doesn't go according to plan. Shortly after taking off, before he starts to rotate into his climb, the parachute inflates and is dragging the ground, and the glider passes it, so S releases and lands straight ahead, nearly all the way down the runway. It was a clean aborted launch, but we're trying to figure out why the line and the chute lagged. The way we figure it, the PW5 is 200 pounds lighter than a Blanik, and has only one occupant, and is very slippery. Once it's airborne and loses the rolling friction of the wheels, and is still in ground effect, it has little drag, so if there's the slightest loss of tension in the line, the parachute can inflate and dragging the line down, and the glider can then overrun it. Once the glider rotates, the wing angling through the air presents a much bigger load (and drag). So it would be important to climb, at least a little, shortly after takeoff. We're pretty conservative about not rotating into the steep climb until we're a hundred feet or more off the ground, so there's a fine line between rotating too early and too late. More on this in tomorrow's post. S takes off again later, and all goes well... I think he released at about 1500' the second time.

Despite not getting started until close to noon, and a 40-minute wait when the winch blows a radiator hose clamp, we get in about a dozen launches of our ships and the other club does quite a few as well.

Winch weekend - Day 1

2010-04-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

The club is going out to a sleepy desert airport for a weekend of winch launching. We will take our own winch and also link up with the local club that flies there. We're taking one Blanik L13, our PW5, and one private ship.

We start arriving about midday. When 5 or 6 guys have arrived, we assemble the Blanik. There's always one or two pins that seem to be hard to get in... This time it's a drag pin and the pin that holds the stabilizers down. But we get it done, and one of the newer club members gets to learn how it goes together.

By "sleepy" I don't mean run down... Quite the contrary. This county airport is well laid out and marked, with two runways and taxiways. But there's not much traffic. All day Friday I think there are 2 or 3 airplane takeoffs, and a helicopter drops in for 5 minutes. That suits us fine, and we lay out our winch line on 3000 feet of the longest taxiway. We fuss with the radios and line up the Blanik.

But things never really get off the ground. The winch doesn't have power at the right speeds. The glider starts off briskly but the overruns the line and has to abort. Two out of three times, the steel bridle gets tangled up in the main wheel. Not good! Eventually we scrub the operation for the day and discuss the problem over dinner. (This all sounds so simple... Actually it's about four hours of driving back and forth, talking on radios and cell phones, and moving equipment around.)

Turns out that a recent modification to the winch transmission is not working properly. Under load, it always wants to shift to second gear, and we need third gear for the climb. It's not the kind of thing that can be fixed here, and the member who works on it has somewhere to be tomorrow, so he takes the winch home.

Tomorrow the local club will be here with their winch, so at least we're not grounded for the weekend.

Gremlins and Gotcha's

2010-04-03T21:28:00.000-07:00

I guess I really wasn't meant to fly today. A long series of mechanical and electrical "gremlins", and logistical "gotcha's" made for a not-so-successful day at the airfield.

I bought a new battery for my handheld radio a few weeks ago, because it seemed that the battery was not holding a charge very long. I usually put it on the charger about 24 hours before I'm going to fly, and I check the battery voltage with a voltmeter on the morning of the flying day, so if it didn't get a full charge for some reason at least I know and I can use alkalines instead. This morning the new battery was dead as a doornail. Zero volts. The charger is putting out, so I'm not sure what happened, and will have to test it this week. At our old field the radio was mostly a convenience but at Elsinore it's a necessity. I'm going to change my routine and charge the radio as soon as I get home, and check it promptly, so I'll have time to charge again if necessary. And now that I think of it, the new battery is significantly bigger than the old one, so it probably needs more than 24 hours to charge anyway. Gremlin #1.

This morning the club was breaking in a New Tow Pilot. That's a good thing - they need more of them. I think he was already qualified as a glider tow pilot, but was just new to this type of airplane and new to this club's location and operating procedures. Along about 10:00 they started preflighting the tow plane, and it seems that NTP needed to do 10 (count 'em - 10) takeoffs and landings to be qualified in this type. So glider pilot #1 sat for about an hour while NTP did about 7 cycles. Another tow pilot eventually jumped in and launched a few gliders. Later NTP did about 3 more cycles and then started towing gliders. It was interesting listening to the lead tow pilot coaching NTP over the radio. Apparently only one towplane was available for use today, so this caused a big delay in glider ops. I don't think the first glider took off until about noon. Gotcha #1.

I recently got a new SUV which I can use to tow glider trailers. I have not towed anything with it yet, so I planned to hook it up to our PW5 trailer and see how level it sits, and tow it around a bit to see how it handles. The hooking-up part was fine - the weight of the trailer caused the vehicle hitch to drop less spend a quarter inch. But the trailer had a completely flat tire, so no opportunity to actually tow it around. Gremlin #2.

Since our club instructor had about three people to fly with, I decided to fly the PW5 instead of a Blanik. We recently relocated it here to Lake Elsinore, and I have not flown it yet. The day was shaping up to have some OK lift, with some CU clearly marking it. So after a quick lunch I started prepping the PW5. The battery was not on a charger as I had thought it might be (the PW5 had been flown once since moving here). So I checked the battery with my voltmeter and it looked good. All went fine with the preflight except that the nosewheel tire was low - VERY low. Gremlin #3. No problem, I now bring a compressor to the field. Except... the little hub crowds the valve stem. There's NO way to get a connector onto it without a valve stem extension. At Hemet, we kept some of them in the flight shack. At Elsinore... well, most of our gear is currently elsewhere. I asked one of the LESC leaders - nope, they don't have any. Ask the guy with the repair shop. Hello? Hello? No one there. I'm not going to poke around in his shop. Any auto parts store nearby? Yep, right after you get into town there are two or three of them. OK, hop into said new SUV and head to town. Don't see any auto parts shops... all the way thru town... finally spot one on the way back, run in, buy a pack of 4 extensions, scoot back to the field. Lift is still working, four gliders clearly having fun under a CU. Let's go for it! With the extension in place, pumping up the tire is easy. Takes about 7 seconds - it's a REALLY small tire!

While driving back, I get a call from a CFI on my cell. What the heck? Bluetooth system in said new SUV doesn't pick up, and I have to hold the phone to my ear - not kosher in California. Huh. It's always worked before. Gremlin #4.

Now it's after 3:00. Push out to the line, I'm #4 for takeoff. This will take a while. Gotcha #2. Glass ship #1 takes off. Glass ship #2 takes off. NTP is getting into a groove, and the tow-and-landing cycle is getting shorter. Schweitzer 2-33 backs out of line, I'm next! Lift is still working - there's a line of clouds marking the top of a shear line.

But the tow plane needs fuel, and that takes a while since NTP is new to the operation here. The clouds are starting to move farther away and get farther between. Gliders are no longer hugging the bottom of the clouds... they're lower and closer to the IP. Gotcha #3.

Tow plane is back, I'm ready to go. It's now 3:50 and the clouds are gone. Gotcha #4.

There's quite strong turbulence all the way from 50 feet AGL up to about 2000' AGL. That doesn't qualify as a Gremlin or a Gotcha, but it does make for some interesting flying on tow. I never got any major slack, much to my surprise.

The variometer needle is going nuts! Swinging widely from 10K of lift to 8K of sink - still on tow! I've seen this before, when the battery died on me out of Tehachapi (see my Dust Devil Dash post from September 2007.) Check the voltage: 12.4. That should be fine. Huh. Faulty vario? Water or dirt or bugs in the static lines? I do remember I thought I might have gotten a drop or two in the TE probe socket when washing the plane - could that cause this behavior? Gremlin #5.

NTP has taken me up to 3000' AGL, and instead of turning to head parallel to the ridge, he keeps heading deeper into the mountains. Gotcha #5: we're at cloudbase and he's still heading away from the field, beyond my comfort zone. I move out to the side to ask him to turn - no result. I remember that the practice here is that tow pilots don't respond to that signal, but they're on the radio and I could ask him to turn. But what the heck, we're high enough and not too far into the mountains, and there's a cloud to my right, so I just release.

The vario is still not right, showing 6 to 10 knots of sink although the altimeter is only going down very slowly. Fortunately I have my clip-on mini-vario, and it's blipping slightly telling me there's a bit of lift, so I just ignore the Borgelt. Unfortunately, the lift is weak and scattered, way too little to keep me up in the air. The shear line stopped working 5 minutes before I took off! Very soon I'm heading for the IP.

At the Initial Point I make the usual call on the radio. Abeam the end of the runway, I can see a towplane getting into position with a glider. Since we take off and land in opposite directions on the same runway, the procedure is for the wing runner and tow pilot to keep an eye on the pattern, and hold the takeoff if they judge that there is not time before the incoming glider would be in the way. (Even if they did take off, the glider could always turn final early, parallel to the runway, and land in the green area to the side.) So I fly a normal approach and keep an eye on the tow plane.
Coach to NTP: "Hold on, there's a glider in the pattern. The guy didn't make a call."
Me to the world: "The guy did call at the IP."
NTP to Coach: "I heard his call."
Gotcha #6: Due to an odd airfield sharing arrangement, glider pilots are discouraged from making any calls other than the first one at the IP. At other fields we call the IP, downwind leg, base leg, and final leg. That way is safer - Coach would have had four chances to hear my position. I don't like this procedure, but that's the way the owner prefers it.

So, after all that, a 17-minute flight, mostly a sled ride. Glass Ship #2 that took off just before me got skunked too. We were just a bit too late.

But at least we got to fly, right?

Good March soaring

2010-03-24T20:42:00.000-07:00

The weather services could not agree on the max forecast temp for Saturday at Lake Elsinore: 67, 76, or 86 depending on who you believed. The temperatures aloft and the forecast sounding looked good though, forecasting lift up to 10,000' MSL if the ground temp got into the 80's.

It was a busy day. I washed and preflighted one of the Blaniks. One of our instructors was conducting BFR's for two pilots, and I'm working toward my instructor rating, so I was asked to help conduct the ground part, which takes about an hour. Then we had our monthly club meeting. Then I flew with an instructor. Then I went over to Hemet-Ryan Airport where some of our club gear is stored to pick up some aircraft log books and other. All part of being in a club!

I need three flights with an instructor within 60 days of the practical test, so this was #1. Our club requires an annual checkride to fly club ships, so this flight served that purpose as well. We took off about 1:30, and I knew that some other ships had stayed up. I was planning to box the wake but the tow pilot headed straight for the hills - did not give me a long straight run. Next time I'll know to advise him when I need to box.

It was a nice clear day, with just a little high cirrus at times. We got into some good thermal lift of up to 600-800 feet per minute. The lift seemed to be in a rough line that followed the southeast side of the Santa Ana Mountains. We speculate that the thermal lift from the sunny southeast side and an onshore flow from the ocean converge at the edge of the hills. We could go back and forth over the edge of the hills, but if we strayed too far west we got out of it. We got as high as 6400' MSL, and the other Blanik got up to 7200' at the same time. Good stuff! I practiced incipient stalls and slow-flight shallow turns. We came back down after 48 minutes. We could have stayed up all day with that lift, but I had places to go and the instructor had other students.

I love it when the lift is working!!

SoaringNV Wave Camp

2010-03-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

Passing on an announcement:

Tuesday, March 30, 2010, pilots from around the world are invited to converge on Minden, Nevada to learn more about this type of glider piloting through a series of lectures, hands-on learning experiences and social activities. Minden is a known hub for soaring enthusiasts, due to its prime geography and weather conditions for the sport. Wave Camp was a staple on the Minden event calendar for years. This is the second year of its revival. The Camp will be held from March 30 to April 3 at SoaringNV at the Minden Airport.

The lectures will be led by some of the most notable and knowledgeable people in the sport.

Fred LaSor – Top instructor and tow pilot
Gordon Boettger – Achieved the North American sailplane distance record in 2005
Rick Walters – Member of the 2009 US Soaring Team Committee
Dr. Morgan McCarroll – Known Reno, Nevada Anesthesiologist
Harlow Voorhees – FAA FAASTeam Program Manager
Mike Moore - Top instructor and tow pilot, exclusive to SoaringNV

Glider pilots, who are interested in learning more about flying in wave, can attend either part of the Wave Camp or all of it. The social aspects of the Camp allow pilots who are interested in wave to learn from those who have done it.

Information about Wave Camp and other SoaringNV programs are available at www.soaringnv.com

Good flight under cloudy skies

2010-01-30T18:50:00.000-08:00

Midday today brought some good-sized cumulus clouds to the eastern edge of the Santa Ana Mountains. Another pilot "T" mentioned he had not yet had a chance to work lift under CU (fairly rare where we used to fly), so we went up together. He also wanted to get some experience in the back seat of the Blanik, so I flew from the front seat.

We had a little trouble with the airspeed indicators on both ships, probably due to some water in the static lines. Mine was showing about 40 knots on tow, which obviously was not correct. By the time we got to about 1,000' AGL mine was about right, although the back one was still a bit off. I think the water dried out or the dirt or whatever moved on. It was not a problem for me for the rest of the flight.

We let off tow at 4200' MSL in light lift that stayed good and got even better. We traded flying duties several times and were able to reach 5600' once and 5200' several times. We could not go any higher without getting into the clouds that seemed to be at about 6000' or so. The lift was commonly 200-400 feet per minute and occasionally up to 800. Not bad for a cool day in January! The NWS forecast was for 65F maximum, lift 350' to 5400', the inversion was forecast for about 4-5000, and my thermal forecast for 60F was to 5000'. I think the ground temp was in the high 60's so the forecast was about right... a little under what we actually got.

There were as many as four gliders in the air at the same time, and we thermalled with one or two at a time. It's good to fly with two pilots - you can share the work and keep a good lookout.

The lift was best on the sunny edge of the clouds. The sun was warming the top of the ridge, and the breeze was from the valley direction. so I think the heat and slight shear made the clouds work. If we got too far east under the darker parts of the clouds, we could feel the air get noticeably cooler, and then it would start to sink. Certain areas were just continually generating lift. We went further westward over the mountains than I have gone before, but still not very far - the ceiling was fairly low and we needed to make sure we had altitude to get back over the ridge. It was easy flying - the first good soaring day I've had since we moved to Lake Elsinore.

We flew across the valley to the Sedco Hills, as much to kill time as for anything. There was a little weak lift but not enough to sustain us. We could have gone back to work the "Old Faithful" lift some more, but we'd had enough. We ended up with an even hour and a half.

Review of 2009

2010-01-19T22:01:00.000-08:00

It's been another good year of soaring. I made great progress, but my goal of becoming a flight instructor has still eluded me. Here are some highlights.

I had a total of 33 flights, 4 more than in 2008:

Fourteen flights with instructors
Five flights with other Private pilots
One flight with a student pilot
Four passenger flights
That leaves 10 solo flights, most of them preparing for Practical tests
No cross-country flights

I worked hard toward my Commercial and Instructor ratings, consciously deciding not to work on cross-country:

In January, I passed my Commercial Pilot Knowledge Test with a score of 95%
In March, I passed my Fundamentals of Instructing Knowledge Test with a score of 100%
In August, I passed my Flight Instructor Knowledge Test with a score of 85%.

Along the way, I did have some fun and some other accomplishments:

I crossed the hundred-hour mark (including instruction... still need a few hours to have 100 as PIC).
I had one of my longest flights, 2 hours and 40 minutes to 13,300' MSL over Tehachapi.
First solo spins in the Blanik L13. And for the first time had fun doing spins! This was a huge breakthrough and confidence-builder for me.
Conducted a couple of ground school classes (same as in 2008).
Learned to do no-flap landings (slip the whole pattern, and transition between left and right slips).
Got my biennial Flight Review via winch launches, and ticked off some instructors in the process.
Prepared and conducted a class on PDAs, SeeYou Mobile, and the Volkslogger.
Got a field checkout for Skylark Field at Lake Elsinore.

And some bad news:

On one of our field trips, we saw a private jet crash while preparing for an Independence Day demonstration.
Our club's home airport was closed to glider operations, ostensibly for "safety reasons" but actually because of the greed of the airport management and county government. This is a huge loss for soaring - gliders have been flying there for about 50 years. Our club is pursuing a complaint with the FAA, and we have reason to believe we might win.
My plans to take my Commercial and Instructor Practical Tests in August were derailed at the last minute by the closure of the airport and the complicated airport management situation. I plan to take my tests in the next couple of months at Lake Elsinore.

So... a mixed year. But I continue to fly a lot, even when the weather is not conducive to soaring. Just being up in the air is so much fun! I'm really looking forward to completing my Commercial and Instructor tests this spring, and flying even more in 2010.

Comments and visitors

2010-01-18T16:22:00.000-08:00

Comments: I've always encouraged comments from readers of my blog. Unfortunately the "blog spammers" eventually found me and I had to turn on "comment moderation" some years ago. That added a bit of delay - comments don't show up until I approve them. Annoying, but no big deal.

Well, the spammers are attacking me again, this time with comments that almost look human-created, but upon a second look are so generic that they're useless. It's become a daily occurrence. So now I'm trying another method: "word verification". If you add a comment, you will have to read a word graphic and enter the word. An annoying step, I know, but I'm sure you've see it in use on other systems. On the plus side, I'll turn off comment moderation, so your comment will show up immediately.

Sorry for the inconvenience. Please keep the comments coming! If there's an aspect of soaring that I haven't written about yet, feel free to send me topic suggestions.

Visitors: In case you're curious:

About 175 to 240 individuals visit my blog in a typical month.
Over the last year, over 1,900 individuals visited at least once.
Usually the day after I post an article, about 20 people visit, and then fewer each day in between posts.
The average visitor reads 1.4 pages, which means most visitors only read one page, the most recent post.
The most popular posts for returning visitors have been Weather and planning for soaring and Class on PDA, SeeYou Mobile, and Volkslogger.

Thank you all for your interest!

Clear weather - new terrain - but no lift

2010-01-03T10:10:00.000-08:00

We're experiencing some gusty winds from the north as a result of high pressure building up after a front went through a few days ago. The direction looked good for producing ridge lift in the "bowl" near Lake Elsinore. And the ADDS wind forecast predicted about 15 knots at the altitude of the top of the ridge. If the orographic lift didn't materialize, there was still the chance of thermal lift. The calculated trigger temperature was 74F. The maximum ground temperature forecasts were all over the place, from 67F to 80F. But at Lake Elsinore, the wind ranged from zero to about 5 knots - usually about zero. It started to heat up fairly well, probably to the mid-70's. (I don't think there's a thermometer out near the flight line - maybe I'll bring one out.)

The local club pilots know that we're new at this location, so they kindly offer suggestions. Several pointed out that it would be better to head for the "Sedco Hills" to the east because of the sun heating up their west-facing slopes. They also pointed out landmarks where thermals can sometimes be found.

View Larger Map

This sounded like a good idea. I had not flown that direction yet, and one concern was that it's a bit further away from the Initial Point for the landing pattern. There are some restrictions at this site about where you can and can't fly, and returning from the Sedcos means you have to traverse more of the no-thermaling area. That means leaving yourself more altitude for the return flight - which means less altitude for hunting for thermals. One pilot suggested that, depending on the wind direction, one could need 800 to 1000 feet to get from the hills to the IP, so that's what I planned on doing.

I let off at 3200' AGL and flew back and forth over the hills a few times. Due to the clear air, the views were terrific, but the lift was nonexistent. I did have time to take a few pictures.

"blip"... finally my audio vario came to life indicating some weak lift. But it died after a half turn. I could find a few blips every time I went around, but not enough to take me upward. Unfortunately it was right over the I-15 freeway, which is the border of the no-thermaling skydiving drop zone. So I could not explore over the flatlands to see if the lift would pick up. Too soon, it was time to head west to the IP.

Well... I could tell visually that it was not as far from the Sedco Hills to the Initial Point as I had thought. I consumed only about 400 feet of altitude getting across the valley. I can see how if the coastal wind is coming from the west it could take more altitude, but for normal flying I don't think it will be a big deal. I got back over near the IP with about 600-700 feet to hunt for more lift. I found a few more blips but nothing strong enough to work.

My pattern and landing were very good. I'm learning to do a "wheel landing" in the Blanik, because of the long, soft dirt runway. That means keeping the glider level on the main wheel after touchdown so the tailwheel doesn't dig in and stop the rollout right away. Quite a contrast from the extreme short stops that we always performed at Hemet. My rollout was nearly all the way back to the taxiway... I just forgot about the light crosswind at the last minute, so I wasn't perfectly straight.

Now the problems began. We're having a problem with the tailwheel on the ship I was flying. It digs into the soft dirt and doesn't roll! I don't think it's the bearing - the wheel rolls fine if you pick up the tail and spin it. And it casters (turns side to side) OK. We think the problem is that the rod it's mounted on is able to twist, so the wheel lays over on its side a few degrees instead of castering into the direction of the turn.

This makes it nearly impossible for two people to push the glider around. It's constantly digging in, and it's as if the brake is being applied.

A Thermal Made Visible

2009-12-20T18:05:00.000-08:00

For as long as I can remember I have occasionally seen flocks of seagulls gathering over our town - up to about 200 at a time, wheeling in circles in a group a few hundred feet tall. Later on I remember seeing the ones at the top heading out in a line, usually toward the ocean. I thought it looked like a thread being pulled from a spool - the flock eventually turned into a long line of gulls and disappeared. I never really noticed that they entered at the bottom and left from the top - I just figured it was some sort of holding pattern as they arrived from feeding all over town.

That was before I knew about thermals.

After I learned to soar, I realized that the gulls in those flock never flap - they're soaring in some thermal over a parking lot or dark roof or something. They're obviously "tanking up" before heading out on a long flight. The dimensions of the flock - horizontal and vertical - probably define the size and shape of the thermal.

So far, so obvious.

This is one of the few times that a thermal is actually visible. The other time that thermals are visible is when they're filled with dust and we call them a "dust devil". Usually those are tall and thin and often moving laterally, but are pretty much vertical columns of dust.

Yesterday I saw another seagull-filled thermal as I was driving on the freeway. The day before we had had "Santa Ana winds" - a local name for a foehn wind. This day the wind had settled down to a breeze - but was still probably between 5 and 10 knots. As I passed by the flock, I could see that the column of gulls was skewed at a 45-degree angle to the vertical. They were still thermaling, but were being carried downwind at the same rate they were rising.

We glider pilots all know that thermals are skewed by the wind - but we very rarely get to see it. The hundreds of gulls made the distortion perfectly clear. What a great teaching tool that would be. Now if only we can arrange for flock of seagulls during ground school...

A short flight under lowering skies

2009-12-12T13:13:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, the weather looked there might be a bit of an opportunity to soar. A cold front was moving in but was well to the north. We could see some lenticular clouds about 15-20 miles away that indicated winds coming our way. If the winds ahead of the front were strong enough, ridge soaring might work. If the sky remained clear, and the wind was NOT strong, some thermal soaring might be possible. A special event going on at the airport meant that we couldn't launch until about 1:00, and this time of the year the sun goes behind the hills about 3:00, so the window would be narrow.

In the morning some of us spent some time talking with a pilot who's flown at Elsinore quite a bit, and observing the sky. The wind was coming in from the ocean side, causing some cumulus clouds to build on the west side of the coastal hills. If they came far enough east we might be able to get up underneath them. As the first launch time approached, they were getting closer and some had concave bottoms indicating lift.

I was about third in line to launch. As we got up to 3000' AGL over the hills, about the typical altitude to release, we were nearly up to the base of the clouds, and the clouds were much grayer and more widespread than they had been just a half hour before. I found a little lift as I released, and a little zero-sink for a while. But the clouds were within about 1000' of the top of the ridge, which left little room for hunting for any lift. Before long I had to drop off the ridge onto the side of the hill, and from the on found nothing but moderate sink. I knew that was a possibility, because if the wind was still coming over the hills from the ocean, it'd be spilling down into the valley.

With a few minutes of slight lift and zero-sink, and then some moderate sink, I ended up with just an 18-minute flight. When I got out of the cockpit after landing, the cloud cover was about 65-75% and the temperature had dropped about 10 degrees. If there was a window of usable lift, I had missed it. The only other private pilot who took off that day got skunked too.

That's OK - I was glad to fly for even a short time, as I'm still focusing on learning the area, getting used to the runways and operations, so I can start planning to take my Commercial practical test at this location.

Weather and planning for soaring

2009-11-16T20:11:00.000-08:00

I wrote about this four years ago. I've changed my weather and planning routine, so here's an updated version.

For every day when I plan local soaring, I prepare by getting as much info as I can about the conditions. Here's what I usually look at. One or two days before:

If I am able to plan ahead, I check out general pressure patterns at the National Hydrometeorological Prediction Center at http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/basicwx/basicwx_wbg.php. Roll your mouse over each tab to get a decent moving display of the fronts. Otherwise I just keep an eye on the fronts and pressures from the TV news.

On the morning I'm planning to fly:

I start by looking at AOPA's Temporary Flight Restrictions and NOTAM page at http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/notams.html. If there's a TFR due to firefighting or presidential movement, that's a show-stopper.
Weather Underground at http://www.wunderground.com/ includes a forecast of temps and winds by hour for the day. I write down the maximum forecast temperature for later use in my Thermal Forecast spreadsheet. This max temperature is usually the same as forecast by the National Weather Service.
Look again at the pressure patterns at the NCEP to see if anything's changed.
DUATS at http://www.duats.com/ to get several pieces of information: 1) synopsis for my region of the state, including forecast sky conditions for the day, 2) terminal forecasts for the two biggest fields closest to my home field, 3) look for any severe weather forecast, 4) temperatures aloft (which I write down for my Thermal Forecast spreadsheet), and 5) NOTAMs. Another major reason for using DUATS is that you have to log in with your Pilot's Certificate number, and they keep a record of it. If anything were to happen, I could prove that I got a DUATS weather briefing that day.
Get a SKEW-T plot from NOAA's RUC Analyses/Forecasts site. I use this to look for inversions and how they might change through the day. You can create bookmarks for the forecast for your favorite airports.
Next I plug the temperatures into my Thermal Forecast spreadsheet and print it one or more of the charts.
Finally, I look at the NWS's local soaring forecast at http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/sgx/data/aviation/soar.htm. I look at it last because I like to form my own opinion of the thermal tops and strengths, and then see if it agrees with this popular forecast. I print this and take it to the field to share.

This sounds like a lot, but it doesn't really take that long.

I used to look at the wind forecast using the ADDS Flight Path Tool from http://adds.aviationweather.gov but have got out of that habit. Now that I'll be flying at a site that can take advantage of ridge soaring, I might start checking it again.

Flying at Skylark Airport / Lake Elsinore

2009-10-18T21:56:00.000-07:00

Our club has arranged to place one or more gliders at Skylark Airport, where towplanes are operated by the Lake Elsinore Soaring Club. (We're placing gliders at several airports during this transition period, to see which ones work out the best for the club.) LESC has been flying there for many years. Several of us went there this week to learn about their operation and get a "field checkout".

This is a private airport, and consists of two dirt strips. There are a few things that make this field a bit different from what many of us are used to, so we all need a little education before we fly:

A very active skydiving company operates here, and in fact is the landlord of LESC, so they have priority. Twin Otter jump planes are constantly taking off and landing. Groups of up to about 24 parachutists land just on the other side of the runways, sometimes coming in from random directions. It's not a problem - skydiving and soaring have coexisted here for a long time - but it's something we need to coordinate with and watch out for.
The skydiving "drop zone" restricts where gliders can fly. We can fly through it as needed, but cannot linger or thermal in the DZ. There are plenty of places to soar over the mountains away from the DZ, but we need to stay away from some parts of the town and lake as much as possible.
The taxiways etc. are all at one end of the runways (29 /11), up against some buildings and a road with some power lines. Takeoffs are always to the northwest (29) regardless of wind conditions. That means sometimes takeoff is downwind. If the tailwind gets too strong, glider takeoffs stop. Glider landings are mostly to the southeast (11) but are allowed "over the wires" to 29 if necessary. Towplane and jump plane landings are always on 11 too, sometimes on both runways.
This all means that takeoffs and landings must be coordinated because sometimes they're in opposite directions. It's not a problem, but it requires some learning. All this coordination of runway use and skydiving means that radio use is mandatory. At Hemet, although the airport was shared with power planes, the power and glider patterns were on opposite sides and exclusive runways. Radio use was optional, and actually was discouraged by the glider FBO... that was a strange situation I won't get into due to pending legal action. Anyway, we all need to be much more diligent about our radio skills.

So I went for a field checkout flight. Takeoff and tow were fairly normal, though the fine dirt of the runway makes for a few seconds of nearly total "brownout". The soaring was not much good since it was late in the day, but the point was just to get familiar with the area anyway. My radio battery died, but the instructor had a backup radio for the landing calls. Pattern and landing were normal, though I did have a tailwind on landing. We didn't snag any parachutes on the way down. ;-) The runway is much longer than the little dirt area we had at Hemet, so there are a few nuances of landing and rollout that we can learn.

All in all, I think this will work out as a good place for us to fly while the Hemet-Ryan complaint makes its way through the FAA. And after I get thoroughly familiar with flying in the area, I should be able to arrange to take my Commercial and Instructor practical tests here - those tests have been on hold for a couple of months.

Last Plane Out

2009-10-10T22:43:00.000-07:00

All the other gliders are gone from Hemet-Ryan Airport. All the T-hangars on the glider side have been sold, dismantled, and removed. The word "GLIDERS" on Runway 22 has been painted over with black, and a big yellow X has been painted over it. The outhouses are gone, and the shade structure outside the Sailplane Enterprises office is in pieces on the ground.

It's quiet.

There's one glider still tied down - one of our club's Blanik L13's. The one I soloed in. The one I first reached 10,000 feet in.

We've come to tow it away to its new temporary home at an airport not far away. But knowing I won't be coming back to this field for a while, the other airport feels very far away.

A towplane will come from the other airport, and a pilot and instructor will take off from the bigger Runway 22. The pilot hasn't done a cross-country aerotow before, and hasn't landed at the other airport. So in keeping with our club's purpose, the last flight from here will be an instructional flight!

I'm here to help push and to run the wing. So we prep the plane, untie it, and put the tie-downs inside the glider instead of leaving them on the ground... we'll be needing them elsewhere after the glider's one-way flight. Technically there's no reason they could not take off from 23 - it's not damaged - but the County has spoken. We push it all the way to the taxiway on the other side of 22.

Due to a mix-up and some technical problems, the towplane takes a long time to arrive. We have time to hang out and talk. A couple of vehicles drive out and the drivers chat with us while we wait. It's pretty rare to see a glider on this side of the field. A few planes and a helicopter come and go... pilots taxiing by wave to us... it's late in the afternoon, so it's pretty dead.

Finally, about 5:30 the towplane arrives and we hook up and launch. The first and only time I've seen a glider take off from 22 (well, there's a motorglider or two who use it). They climb, circle the field once, and head west into the lowering sun.

I get in the car we came in and drive out the gate. There's no one on this side of the airport to say good-bye to.

But... we may be back. Next week we will file a formal complaint with the FAA in Washington, D.C., with the support of AOPA and Cal Pilots. If that works, and gliders get to return, it could turn out better than ever. Some of our leaders have developed the concept of a "Glider Park", and have presented some conceptual drawings to some of the community leaders of Hemet. So... we'll see. While the complaint makes its way through the FAA, we'll keep flying our silent ships over other fields.

In Transition

2009-10-02T22:35:00.000-07:00

The county has "X"-ed the glider runway at Hemet. OCSA and HACA leaders and attorneys feel we are in a good position to get this reversed through the FAA's formal complaint process. We're getting lots of publicity in the press. I won't say more about the clubs' strategy for now, just in case someone from the county is listening.

Our club board now has a plan for continuing our flight and training at several other gliderports while we continue the battle with the county (but we're not announcing it quite yet... still some logistics to work out). So we'll have some opportunities to fly over some different terrain for a while. I'm hoping to fly at one or the other over the next couple of weekends. Once we are established in our temporary locations, I'll look into which site provides the best option for taking my Commercial and Instructor tests.

Forced to move

2009-09-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

On September 1, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors voted to grant a six-month extension for soaring at Hemet-Ryan, with a possible three-month extension beyond that. It looked like we had some time to work with the FAA and AOPA and SSA on helping the airport management understand the value of soaring to the airport and the Hemet community.

This week we found out what the word of the Riverside County Board of Supervisors is worth - absolutely nothing! On Friday they abruptly rescinded the extension, and all gliders are to be off the field by the original deadline - October 1.

I suppose this should not be surprising, since we have already seen that the Economic Development Agency is also behaving dishonestly. In a letter to the FAA dated August 18, 2009, the EDA states they have had "extensive dialogue" with the glider pilots. This is a lie. I expected better from the elected Board of Supervisors.

In late August, a new organization was formed called the Hemet Airport Community Association. This group has already met with glider pilots, power pilots, members of other pilots' associations, and aviation attorneys. HACA has initiated a legal fund and has engaged an attorney to continue the fight with the county. I think some of the power private pilots are concerned that the county's misguided attempt to convert Hemet-Ryan into a business jet airport will threaten their right to fly light aircraft, just as it is threatening the glider activity. Although our club is being forced to leave, the battle is not yet over.

Fortunately it appears that our club now has a viable option for soaring from another airport, and we could be flying club ships there as early as next weekend. I won't say more about that until the arrangement is formally announced.

So instead of flying yesterday, a bunch of us spent the day packing up the contents of our clubhouse and moving it to temporary storage.

"Gonna do some spins?"

2009-08-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

We don't usually wear parachutes in our two-place Blanik trainers. So when we do, everyone we meet seems to ask, "Gonna do some spins?" Yep, that's what was on our agenda today. I'm working with an instructor to finish up training flights required for my Commercial and Instructor practical tests. One of the requirements is "...instructional proficiency in stall awareness, spin entry, spins, and spin recovery procedures...". Technically you don't need to wear parachutes when doing spins with an instructor, but we all think it's a good idea!

We took a 4200' AGL tow and were careful about doing clearing turns because we knew two other gliders were in the area. We also made sure we were well clear of the Victor airway that runs south of the airport - you can't do aerobatics within 4NM of an airway. We were able to do four spins and recoveries and still had a few hundred feet before reaching 1500' AGL, the minimum altitude for completing aerobatic maneuvers.

For three of the spins, I entered with the traditional method: pulling up into an obvious stall before using full rudder. For one of them, I did a more subtle spin entry that should be really useful in training students. I just slowed down to stall speed and kicked full rudder, much like what would happen in a too-slow approach with a skidding turn. In this case the nose was not in an obviously high attitude, although of course my angle of attack was high to get the slow speed. A slow entry like this really shows how a spin could sneak up on you.

I noticed more G force when pulling out of some of these spins than I did on some previous solo spins. Maybe I was eager to complete the recovery with little loss of altitude, and pulled up a little aggressively?

I made sure to enter one of the spins to the right, since I had noticed I tended to do them to the left in the past. That's probably because I favor left turns in general. I read an article somewhere that explained that: we control the stick with our right hands, and it's easier to push across to the left than to pull to the right - it's just a more natural angle for your arm and wrist.

We didn't try to go soaring, because we had other ground school work to do that afternoon. For the landing, I worked on using the wind to my advantage on base and final legs. My altitude on base leg has been right for no-wind conditions, but sometimes I underestimate how much a headwind component is going to knock me back on final approach. In the middle of the base leg, my instructor pointed out that I was a little high, and I said that was intentional. I slipped it a bit and kept my glide path a little higher than I've been doing. And guess what: touchdown was right in the box, instead of a couple feet short as I sometimes do.

We glider pilots (at least in my club and at my location) are real sticklers for accurate landings. There's a line in the sand that you are not to touch down before. We judge every landing in relation to that line. And if you're trying to land to commercial requirements, you have to stop in just a few hundred feet, so you don't want to land much beyond that line or you use up too much stopping space. So there's a very narrow sweet spot about 10 feet long that we're aiming for. And that line is imaginary, between two cones. There used to be a chalk line, but it's long since worn away. So you're using your peripheral vision and quick glances left and right to estimate your approach over that line. Very tricky to get just right! But it means you learn to put the ship down where you want it, within 10 feet or so. That came in very handy when I landed out at Olancha, where the dirt strip had a few bushes here and there.

Airport Battle on the Front Page

2009-08-19T18:13:00.000-07:00

Our fight to keep soaring at Hemet-Ryan made the front page of the Press-Enterprise today. Check it out... and please pass it on to anyone interested in aviation.

More pictures are available here.

More on the movement to save soaring at Hemet-Ryan

2009-08-15T22:06:00.000-07:00

Listen to an interview published by AVweb.com.

Closing in on Commercial

2009-08-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

Friday and Saturday I worked on ground school and instructional flights in final preparation to take my Commercial practical test at the end of this month. We also went over the questions I missed on my written Instructor test. My instructor agreed with my disagreement with the only two questions I missed that actually related to gliders.

Some flights included practice teaching maneuvers, and that went really well. Two flights included practicing a left-hand pattern, something we don't usually do at this airport. That means flying in the power aircraft pattern, and crossing over to the glider runway to land. We actually fly our pattern a ways inside the power pattern, so it's not really much of a conflict. It also means monitoring the radio and the sky to make sure we know where all the power planes are. (Usually we're over on the other side of the airport, so except for the base leg, we are totally out of each others' way.) I've done this before, a long time ago, though I see I never blogged about it. Anyway, except for entering the pattern a little higher, using different landmarks, and extending the downwind leg a bit, it's no big deal as long as the power traffic is light. We did choose to delay one of the landings while two CDF tankers took off - not that our landing would have been a conflict with their takeoff.

The only thing that made it - well, interesting - was that both the front and rear airspeed indicators were underreporting by at least 5 to 10 knots. We detected that while on tow. So I flew the entire pattern and landing (both times) with minimal reference to the ASI - relying on wind noise and angle of attack (attitude) to gauge my airspeed. Actually, that's a good thing to practice!

So if all goes as planned, we have one more requirement to complete next weekend, then I'll have my endorsement to take the Commercial test, which I already have scheduled. I need to fill out my application and gather all my endorsements etc. for a review with the DPE next weekend.

Two Flights Preparing for Practical Tests

2009-08-08T20:35:00.000-07:00

Today I got in the last of my ten solo flights as required for my Commercial practical test. I'll still keep practicing, but at least now I have the required number of solo flights logged. Although there was lift available, I didn't really work it much because I wanted to get in two takeoffs and landings. Wing-down takeoffs are now easy. I boxed the wake on both tows. The first time, I hit some sink on the low-tow leg, and got way low - that was weird! So I made sure to do it on the next flight too, and that time it was very good.

For the first pattern and landing, I did the no-drag-devices routine and that went well. My landing was a little longer than the first box, but the no-flaps landing doesn't have to be an accuracy landing. For the second one, I did the regular flaps-n-spoilers pattern, and that went fine too. With about a 10-knot headwind, the Blanik stops in the first box really nicely.

My deadline for completing my Commercial and Instructor practical tests got moved up! I thought I had until the end of September. Now I find out the operator and DPE is planning to shut down a week earlier. And I had a vacation of nearly two weeks already booked and paid for in early September. So it's going to be a tight squeeze. It may still be doable. I now have an appointment in late August to take the Commercial test. That is, if I can get in the final flights I need with my instructor - we've had some scheduling issues. And if I get the instructor's sign-off. I think that should be OK, but there are a few things that needed work, so I need to demonstrate mastery of those. And then if all goes well, the Instructor test in late September... if all goes well.

Passed my Flight Instructor written test

2009-08-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

Today I took the last of the written tests I need, the Flight Instructor - Glider. It's 100 multiple-choice questions. They give you 2.5 hours, and I think I used about an hour and a quarter. (One of my test-taking strategies is to not be in a rush to finish - go back and recheck every question.) I knew I would pass - you only need a 65% score to pass, and my practice test scores were in the 87-91% range. I got 85%, lower than I expected. I got 95% on my Commercial, and 100% on my Fundamentals of Instructing.

You might ask, "Why do you care about your score, as long as you passed?" Well, you have to spend time with an instructor to cover any areas of knowledge that you missed. So I'd prefer to self-study and get a high score, and not have to use instructor time for reviewing it afterward.

They don't tell you what questions you missed, they just give you "learning statement codes" that indicate the general topic area. By going back to the practice test software, you can pretty much figure out which ones you missed.

Of the 15 I missed:

6 were totally irrelevant to glider flight.
4 were about documents and regulations, the kind of things I can look up when needed
3 were real misses on things I should know (mostly weather)
1 I don't know why I missed - maybe hit the wrong letter, but my double-check should have caught that.
1 I disagree with their answer and will have to do some research

Only two misses were directly related to soaring or gliders.

There are many questions that I think are totally irrelevant to the FI-Glider test, in that they relate only to powered flight. Things like VOR and ADF navigation (which gliders don't have), flight into Class B airspace (which we don't do nor do we have avionics for), and magnetic compass and wind correction angles (which glider pilots rarely use because of our circling flight and meandering paths). I guess the reason they are on the FI-Glider test is that an instructor could get an initial certificate for gliders and then later go on to get a power rating and instruct in that realm, so they want you to know that stuff. But as I understand it, you have to take another set of tests for the power rating, so why not cover the power-only stuff in that later learning track? Maybe someone can explain the logic to me someday. Meanwhile, I just figure I'm going to miss a certain percentage of those questions, and I just make sure I'm really solid on the stuff that does apply.

I've figured out why I can't learn some of the irrelevant stuff and have it "stick". Maybe others can relate to this as well. It's that some of these ideas are what I call initially arbitrary. There's nothing for me to "hook into" to resolve the arbitrary questions, so I remain uncertain of the correct answer regardless of how many times I study it. Until I have some direct experience with the topic, there's no way to be sure which of the possible arbitrary answers is correct. Let me give you an example:

A VOR receiver is used for radio-based navigation. It's used in power planes, but not in gliders, so I've never seen one. The dial shows you a left or right indication with a needle, depending on... what someone arbitrarily decided to show. Way back when, the designers could have decided that a left indication means "the VOR transmitter is off to the left". Or it could mean "the airplane is to the left of the VOR transmitter". Either one would be useful, but the way you use it would be totally opposite. And I'm sure they chose one or the other and have stuck with it forever. That's why I call it initially arbitrary. And I'm sure that after one or two flights, with the feedback that comes from seeing the effect of correct and incorrect usage, it'd make sense, it'd be locked in my mind and would no longer be arbitrary. But until I see a VOR and how it works, it's all theoretical to me... and arbitrary, because either indication could be equally valid, and so it's hard to remember with certainty.

That's the same reason I don't even try to memorize seldom-used phone numbers. They're arbitrary, and hard to remember without frequent use. 532-6398 is just as valid as 523-3689... so how can I be sure?

Similarly, "west variation" and "east variation" for magnetic compasses are arbitrary designations. Does variation mean "which way magnetic north is from true north" or the other way around? Either would be a valid basis for a system of navigation. Get off on the wrong foot, and all your calculations will be reversed, yet self-consistent. So until I actually use a magnetic compass to get somewhere, it's not going to stick.

So, I'm happy with an 85% score. If the test didn't include lots of questions about power flight, I'd be a lot happier.

All of the questions were about aerodynamics, navigation, weather, regulations, procedures, and documentation, just more detailed than on the Private and Commercial tests. None of the questions were about instructing.

Stop The Closure of Hemet-Ryan Gliderport

2009-07-29T19:39:00.000-07:00

Join SSHT and Write the Supervisor in Charge!

As the first (of possibly many) steps, we need to organize ourselves and communicate to the politicians our displeasure with the closing of Hemet Ryan to gliders. With Oct 1st coming soon this need is immediate, so please do these two things TODAY.

1- Write and encourage everyone possible to write to Supervisor Stone expressing their displeasure with the loss of soaring at Hemet Ryan to the aviation community.
2- For further updates, join the Save Soaring at Hemet Today (SSHT) Google News Group at:

The county supervisor over Hemet Ryan is Jeff Stone, Riverside County Supervisor, Third District. His address is:

Supervisor Jeff Stone
43950 E. Acacia, Suite A
Hemet, CA 92543

Perhaps easier, Supervisor Stone has a website with a “Constituent Assistance Request Form” at http://district3.co.riverside.ca.us/

• State that you are against the closing of Hemet Ryan to glider operations in the first sentence.

• Ask that Supervisor Jeff Stone assist in preventing the closure.

• State that in your “pilot’s opinion” from actually flying at the site that the operation of Runway 23 is historically safe and future improvements are easily attainable.

• State there is no acceptable local alternative airport for soaring at Hemet

• If you live in Riverside County, do state that you do.

Who should write? As many as possible…everyone (not just pilots) who wants to see soaring continue at Hemet Ryan.

The SSHT Google NewsGroup is at: http://groups.google.com/group/save-soaring-at-hemet-today

Hot and Stable

2009-07-26T22:39:00.000-07:00

Although this weekend wasn't as blisteringly hot as last weekend, it was still about 98F and quite humid. The various forecasts predicted possibly good soaring, but it was not to be. I think the main reason was a very strong inversion. As part of my morning weather analysis, I use a little web site from NOAA which provides an interpolated "sounding" plot for most any airport. (You can find it at http://www-frd.fsl.noaa.gov/mab/soundings.) I use the one for March Air Reserve Base, which is pretty close to Hemet. It showed a very strong inversion at 5,000 MSL, effectively putting a lid on most thermal activity. It also showed an interesting convergence of the temperature and dew point from 18,000 to 25,000. Which means if you could get up high, you'd find thick cumulus clouds. By 10:30 there were already cumulonimbus forming at about 13,000 over the mountains. They overdeveloped and it looked like they produced rain all afternoon.

So I just planned to do another commercial/instructor practice flight in a Blanik. I always hope to find some lift to offset the stalls and slips I'm practicing. A few guys reported some thermals in midafternoon, but due to insufficient tow plane capacity, I didn't get up until after 3:30, and what little lift there may have been was gone. I spent much of the afternoon pushing gliders around, running the wing for others, and waiting in the hot sun.

I practiced boxing the wake, removing slack line on tow, then shallow slow-flight turns, incipient stalls, speed control while entering turns, and a full stall. There was a little zero-sink air and a little strong sink. I flew over the airport to review the pattern for the power runway - the examiner may want me to fly a pattern on the other side with the power traffic, so I plan to practice that one day soon.

As described before, I'm practicing flying the pattern with no drag devices (flaps or spoilers) because that seems to be an item on the commercial practical test. I think my directional control in the forward slip for the full downwind leg was really good, as well as a turning slip to the base leg. And I made sure to be looking for traffic in both patterns the whole time - that's another item the examiner is strict about, but it's always been a good habit of mine anyway.

Once on final approach, it became obvious I was not going to need to reverse my forward slip direction as I had been planning to practice. I was not going to need any slip at all... in fact, I was going to land short. What the...?? Only later when I thought about it did I figure out what had happened and why:

During the 45-degree leg (the pattern entry), for some reason I had a hard time spotting the wind sock. I knew that there had been a fairly strong wind, about 14-18 knots when I took off, and I wanted to be sure to know what it was doing so I could plan my slipping pattern. That turned out to be a bigger distraction than I realized.
I switched over to AWOS to get the wind, and waiting for it consumed most of my 45-leg time, putting me a little behind with my downwind turn, slip setup, and radio call.
So although I got the wind direction right, I failed to adjust my pattern speed for the wind strength. That had little effect on downwind and base, but when I turned final, that insufficient airspeed meant that I didn't penetrate the now-headwind, and I ended up short... and wondering why.

So what I learned is that I should get the wind from AWOS well in advance of entering the pattern, so I'm not rushed. Then make sure to use the "S" for speed in the checklist to choose my pattern speed as well as compensate for the wind direction. That's second nature on a normal pattern, but for this no-drag-device approach, I've been thinking too much about the wind direction for the slip, and not enough about the whole FUSTALL checklist. More to practice! I'm planning to fly every weekend that I'm in town in August and September.

On the other hand, my study and practice tests for the CFI written tests are going really well, and I plan to take the test within the next two weeks.

A Personal Breakthrough with Spins

2009-07-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

The instructor I've been working with on my Commercial and Instructor training was not available today, so I planned to make this a practice day. Tops on my list of things to work on were spins and slip transitions. I was hoping for good thermalling conditions so I could regain the lift that I planned to lose. If not, I'd do a couple of high tows to get in some good practice. The weather forecasts I use did not agree, and it looked to me like it would be stable with little hope for soaring high. All I could plan on was that it would be HOT. By 10:45 it was already 101F. With few people at the field, I decided to take a flight fairly early and then another one after a lunch break. So I launched with a wing-down takeoff at 12:15 when the dust devils started popping.

I've had spin training with two different instructors (blogged here and here), and I have done a few solo spins in the PW5, but have not done solo spins in the Blanik. Looking back at my blog entries, I said my spins with instructors were not really scary, but that's because the instructor was always there. Before (and between) my first solo spins in the PW5, I was really nervous. But on this flight I really didn't think too much about it. After getting off tow (which included boxing the wake) at 4000' AGL, I cleared the area and went right into the spins, not wanting to waste any altitude.

The first spin entry was amazingly easy and gentle. Not much sensation of the nose dropping, it just felt like turning left and turning down at the same time. Getting established in the spin was easy. I just remember thinking "hold it in... hold it in...". Watching the ground go around seemed perfectly natural, and it was even easy to count my turns. I felt no inclination to get out of the spin, as I had felt with my first solo spins. After a turn and a half, I recovered from the spin with the usual sequence of control inputs, and pulled out nice and smoothly. I remember thinking "Wow - that was really easy." Period - not exclamation point. It was just... easy and natural.
For the second one, I had to cruise a little to get out from over a hill (I'd rather have all the absolute altitude I can get.) Again, the spin entry was really gentle. I counted one and three quarter turns and then recovered. This time I think I waited a bit too long before pulling out of the resulting dive, and I remember seeing 100 knots as I pulled out, which I think was too high, and I felt more G force than before. But again, it was not scary at all, it was - dare I say it? Fun! I think it was on this spin that I looked at the altitude loss, and it was about 300 feet. I remember thinking, "I can now see how people can say they enjoy spins." Before today, I could not say that.
I had enough altitude to do one more. This one went just like the others, easy in and easy out. I remember that it seemed that the speed of the spin varied a little bit, and it seemed to smooth out when I ensured that the rudder was all the way to the stop - maybe I was letting it up a little? This time when I looked at the airspeed after recovering, I was going 70 knots which I thought was much better. I checked the manual just now, and it says the spin recovery speed is 87 knots, so maybe I looked at it after climbing a bit.

What a better experience than my first solo spins back in April! I remember some time ago seeing a book titled "At Home in the Sky". That's become one of my goals: to be at home in the sky, to be totally comfortable with whatever maneuvers I need to do. I think my experience today was a major step toward that goal.

I found no lift, but I had enough altitude left to practice switching from a left forward slip to a right one. This kind of transition may be needed when turning from the downwind leg to the base leg to the final approach, depending on the wind conditions, and I needed the practice. In today's pattern, the wind was from the southwest (across an east-west runway), so I needed right forward slip downwind and on base, and then left slip on final. I worked on keeping my ground track straight and doing a smooth slipping turn to base leg. By the end of the base leg, I had lost enough altitude that I needed to get out of it before turning final and establishing the left slip... I know my instructor had wanted to see a smooth transition from one direction to the other, but if I had done that I would have been too low.

It was so blasted hot that I decided not to fly again in the afternoon. It had been 108F when I took off, and up at 4000' AGL it was probably still 90. The highest temperature reported by AWOS was 111.

Training in the Heat

2009-07-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

It was 105F in the shade today. Unfortunately, many of the activities of soaring do not occur in the shade: assembling gliders (we put the PW5 back together), washing & inspecting, pushing out to the line, and back from the landing zone. "But it's a dry heat!" Actually, that's true, and after doing this for 6 years, I'm pretty well acclimated to it, up to about 110F. Unlike some very hot days, the atmosphere was somewhat unstable and the lift was working. Several students had some pretty long rides, and even though I launched at 4:15 pm, we found strong stuff to work, but only up to 5500' MSL where the inversion seemd to top out.

I had a single 45-minute training flight with the instructor I've been working with to prepare for my Commercial rating. Quite a bit to do on these flights: box the wake, slack line correction, steer the towplane, multiple stalls, multiple incipient stalls, slow-flight turns, steep turns, thermalling. Fortunately we found lift to recover the altitude we lost with stalls. Flying the pattern with no flaps or spoilers, which means slipping the entire pattern in order to get down, and only using spoilers in the last 100' above the ground. I got a lot of pointers and will need to work on my accuracy with some of these during my solo flights. Plus I need to do more spins, up to 1 and a half turns.

And now I have a deadline! We just found out that our gliderport is closing on October 1. The county (or the airport) wants to close the glider runway as of that date. The owner of the glider operation is the local FAA "designated pilot examiner" and I've been planning to take my tests with him. Trying to take my tests anywhere else (Warner Springs, Crystal, Tehachapi, or wherever else there's a DPE) would be a logistical nightmare! So after consulting with my instructor, we decided that I will try to complete both the Commercial and Instructor ratings before he leaves. I had been planning to do the Commercial by about that date, and figured the Instructor would take quite a bit more training, but we think (hope) I can get this done. Many of the requirements are very similar, so lots of people do both very close together. I have about half of my specific "preparation" flights logged, but of course those are just minimum requirements: I need to do as many as it takes to show my instructor that I'm ready. It'll take some coordination, especially since I have a two-week trip planned in the middle of all this. I'll keep this blog updated as I go along. If any readers are CFIs, I'd welcome comments about how you went about your Commercial and Instructor ratings.

A Short Dual Flight at Tehachapi

2009-07-07T20:34:00.000-07:00

Friday's weather was terrific for soaring. Saturday's was significantly drier - no CU at all but still decent lift in the valley. Some pilots got 2.5 to 3.5 hour flights - I didn't fly, just helped launch and gave a briefing to a pilot G who was new to the PW5.

Sunday was also dry but was even weaker... very few flights. But G was able to stay up for a while in the PW5, so C and I decided to give it a try in the Grob 103, knowing it would not be great. But I had a couple of things I wanted to work on. My last approach and landing at this airport (back in May) was not so hot, so I wanted to give it a shot from the front seat where the forward view is better.

C did the takeoff, tow, and the first half of the flight. As expected, we only found about 1-2 knots of lift in a narrow band. It may have been a weak shear line, but the wind was only 8 knots at 8,000' MSL, and I'm not sure that's enough for a shear.

I took over after a while and went looking for thermal lift. I did find a bit, but again only 1-2 knots for a very short time. I was wishing for flaps like we have on the Blaniks. (If you pull Fowler flaps halfway out, you can get increased wing surface area without much drag, and sometimes that makes all the difference in weak lift.) Pretty soon we were back to the airport and down to pattern altitude. Too bad - it was a nice clear day and I would have liked to fly for more than 35 minutes.

I'd had time to analyze why my last landing in May was so ugly, and made a number of corrections. My pattern planning and my approach glideslope were much smoother than last time, and my speed was right where it needed to be (we only had 8 knots of wind, straight down the runway). Final approach was straight and level, flare was at the right height, touchdown was not rushed and so it was very gentle, and the rollout was perfect. It made me feel much better about landing the Grob at this site.

Things Flying Fast and Low - Some Good, Some Bad

2009-07-04T22:05:00.001-07:00

The Good

Sitting under the trees at the Mountain Valley Gliderport, I heard a "whoosh!" and quickly looked left. A small, fast-moving blur just a few feet to my left. Faster than any radio control plane I've ever seen. It zig-zags between some of the trees, and I catch a glimpse of a darkish bird with pointed wings. It must be a peregrine falcon! It's banking and swooping like a TIE fighter in Star Wars, probably after some of the blackbirds and larks that are flying around. In less than 2 seconds it's past the other end of the glider parking area, about 300 feet away, and then gone. I do the math... it was flying at 80 to 100 MPH at 3 feet off the ground. Amazing!

The Bad

Our morning pilots' meeting is interrupted a few times by the roar of small jets... and by pilots getting up to go watch them. It's a flight of three L-29 trainers, the kind that are often privately owned. We assume they're in town for an Independence Day exhibition, though there's no real "air show" listed in the local paper. They fly around the valley a few times, sometimes in a delta formation and other times following each other. Though we're glider pilots, we still love fast and noisy things flying low!

Later that day, we see them take off again, one after another, from the municipal airport a few miles away. They make a turn around the valley and form up again, no more than 2000' above the ground. We see a tow plane and glider at a higher altitude than the jets, but not really close to them. We hear some chatter on the radio but don't know that it's the jet pilots. I look away to watch a glider coming in for a landing. Among the chatter on the radio we hear "Abort" a couple of times, and wonder if it has something to do with the glider that's landing. When I look back west, there's a dense cloud of black smoke just over a ridge, just a couple miles away. Smoke appearing that fast can only mean one thing, and it's not good. The smoke rises and dissipates quickly... this is no brush fire. We see no parachutes. On the radio we hear pilots talking about looking for "number three", going around the valley again, and eventually going back to land. Then nothing more.

Later in the day, the news comes in. The jet crashed on a road just south of town, fortunately missing houses. There are no survivors. The pilot was the Tehachapi Municipal Airport manager; the passenger is not identified. One of the glider pilots/tow pilots here knows the guys that fly the jets.

Glider pilots who were in the air at the time later relate that they saw the jets and later the smoke, but had no way of knowing they were related. Some of our wives were out for the day, touring the valley and visiting produce farms. We learn that they were on that road about 15 minutes before the crash.

Tehachapi Valley

2009-07-03T22:01:00.000-07:00

Our club is flying at Tehachapi (Mountain Valley Airport) this weekend. We have the PW5 and the Grob 103. There are only a few club members here, so long flights are possible. For several reasons, I did not plan to do any true cross-country soaring, so I juat flew over the valley and the immediately surrounding mountains.

It turned out to be a great day for thermal soaring! Lots of cumulus clouds to mark lift, but not enough to block the sun; no overdevelopment, and not much wind. I let off at 3000' AGL (7200' MSL) and hooked a good thermal right away. Although there was plenty of lift to be had, there were still several challenges. Some CU that looked to be developing (e.g. concave bottoms) never panned out. Some were ragged and I think indicated rotor rather than lift, though the wind was only about 15 knots. There were some VERY rough areas near the Tehachapi Mtns. I found quite a number of thermals both under CU and in the blue, commonly getting up to 12,500' MSL or so. The highest was 13,300', for a maximum gain of 6,100'. I found lift of up to 700 ft/min sustained, and it got really strong just under the cloud bases. I also found some serious sink (900 ft/minute for 2-3 minutes). And sometimes entering thermals I hit the biggest bumps I've ever encountered - knocking me way up out of my seat although my belts were as tight as possible.

I went as far west as the Tehachapi Loop (a somewhat famous railroad circle), as far east as the end of the valley, and as far south as the top of the Tehachapi Mts. Since I wasn't planning to go anywhere far, I used the opportunity to explore and compare SeeYou Mobile with the Borgelt B50 Super Vario that's installed in the ship. For the first half of the flight, the audio Speed To Fly correlated very well with the STF on SeeYou: when I sped up to the SeeYou STF, the Borgelt "faster" tone shut up. (That is, after I set he correct polar: SeeYou was still set to a Grob 130. Oops.) But after an hour or so, the B50 was always saying "faster" no matter what the lift was doing. This was really annoying, so eventually I quit using "cruise" mode and stayed in "climb" mode while flying straight. This made the display a simple vario, which was fine, but gave no STF audio. I've looked at the B50 manual to see if I was doing something wrong, and I can't find anything. I can only conclude that it was a malfunction, and will watch for it to happen again. I have suspected for some time that the vertical gauge that is supposed to show STF was not working, but assumed it was just the meter. Now I'm thinking that maybe it's the computer. If it happens again I'll power-cycle it to see if it resets.

I also used another feature of SeeYou Mobile. The Thermal Assistant gives a visual indication of where in your circle the best lift was found. It also gives an audible tone a couple of seconds BEFORE you get back to a good spot, and it seemed to be really accurate. This is another great feature for helping you keep your eyes outside the cockpit instead of looking down at the display. I wasn't aware of it until I prepared for the class I recently taught... I found it to be helpful.

I thermalled for a while with a 1-26, which was a little tricky because our speeds and glide ratios were different. We "poached" off of each other for quite a while.

The lift today was so strong I had to use spoilers to force the glider down to pattern altitude. I could have stayed up for a lot longer but decided to come down after 2 hours and 40 minutes. It would have been a great day to try for my 5-hour Silver Duration flight, but alas the Volkslogger did not come along on this trip... and it's a real pain to document a duration flight without it.

Tomorrow is not forecast to be as strong, but still probably a good soaring day. I'm trying out a new online soaring forecast site called XC Skies. So far I like it a lot! It pretty well nailed today's weather at this location. I'll have to see how well tomorrow matches its predicton, and try it out for my home field at Hemet.

Above & Below the Clouds

2009-06-22T23:07:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I shared a flight in a Blanik L13 with another pilot. The weather was much worse than expected... nearly overcast until about 2:00. When it finally broke up there were still some little cumulus clouds that looked like they could be useful, but not very high - ceiling had been reported to be 1900' AGL. I planned to practice incipient stalls, so we took a tow up to about 4000' AGL to buy some time. He flew the tow then handed it over to me. As we climbed, we passed those CU's with cloudbases about 2200' AGL, so we knew that was as high as we would ever get back up. But from 4000' we had a nice view of the tops of the retreating overcast to the south. We rarely get to see the tops of the clouds on glider flights.

I did some straight and turning stalls, some incipient stalls during slow, shallow turns, then when we got below cloudbase I gave the glider back to him. Although there were a few little CU right around us, they were pretty ragged by the time we got there - already dissipating. He and I took turns trying to work the weak lift we found - no more than about 150 feet/minute in places.

Pretty soon we were back down to the pattern altitude. Since I'm working on my no-flaps approaches and my precision landings, we had arranged that he would do the tow and I the landing. Although I made a couple of mistakes in the downwind leg, my speed control and glide slope were good in the base and final. With about a 14-knot headwind, my landing and rollout within the first target box were really good. I continued to fly the wings level whole he opened the canopy and got out of the glider... finally setting the wing down to push back. Our total flight time was 27 minutes. Pretty short, but not bad considering the altitude I lost doing four stalls.

Later in the day the club operation switched to winch launching:

Class on PDA, SeeYou Mobile, and Volkslogger

2009-06-11T21:21:00.000-07:00

Because I've been using soaring software in the club ships for a while, some folks in the club asked me to run a little class to help them get started. Now, I'm not an expert, but I have worked out how to use SeeYou Mobile on a Pocket PC, and to use it either with or without the Volkslogger (a secure flight logging device that the club owns). So I agreed to do it. And as usually happens when I prepare to teach something, I learned a few things, too! I see I have written a bit about the topic a few times, but not a comprehensive article about my hardware and software setup, so maybe I'll blog on that soon. It's not hard but not exactly simple... you need to understand the wiring, the options around where the GPS information can come from, and where and how it's recorded.

The main topics were:

Brief intro to the PDA
How to use most of the features of SeeYou Mobile
How to upload a task declaration to the Volkslogger with ConnectMe
How to download flight traces from the VL

I found a cool way to conduct most of the software part of the class. Naviter offers a PDA/SeeYou simulator program that runs on a PC. So I put that on a laptop, hooked up an external monitor so more people could see it, and zoomed up the screen resolution to make the PDA image bigger. This way up to about 8 people could look on, much more than would be able to see the tiny screen of a real PDA. As it turned out, we had four people plus myself, so it worked out great.

I loaded up a flight trace from the local Hemet area, which included some thermalling, and played back various parts at different speeds to demonstrate all the important features. I also prepared a four-page cheat sheet full of notes that they could take away with them as reminders (and which I used as an outline), and some diagrams showing the flow of information between the various hardware and software parts.

I felt it was important to demonstrate nearly all the screen features, navigational indications, and the main ways to customize the display. It's very important to spend some "quality time" to become very familiar with the device and the software on the ground so you're not trying to learn and/or configure it while you're flying. You don't want it to be a major distraction that pulls your head down into the cockpit too much... you still have to fly the glider, after all. Hopefully this gets them off to a good start and can save them a few hours of figuring out what's where.

The classroom part took about two hours, and then we also spent maybe 20 minutes actually hooking everything up in a glider and demonstrating downloading a flight trace. That part went OK but because of the sun glare, no one but me could really see the program on the PDA.

Most of the participants were flight instructors who, although they've flown huge numbers of hours, and may have used GPS's in other situations, have never delved into soaring-specific software. Everyone seemed pretty pleased with the class. Now that I have the materials, I could run it again when more pilots get ready to use such systems for cross-country soaring.

Tehachapi Day 3

2009-05-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

Monday started out a bit warmer and less breezy, but throughout the day the conditions were about the same as Sunday. The few thermals were narrow and hard to center. The shear line was working, but not everyone could exploit it enough to get very far from the airport.

In the morning we worked on removing the faulty radio from the front cockpit. Then I flew the Grob with one of our instructors. While I flew, he wanted to try out my PDA-GPS combo. Unfortunately it had some sort of interface problem, and the PDA could not get the GPS data for most of the flight, so that was a bust. (It worked fine on the ground afterward.) Much like Sunday's flight, although there was lift I was not able to work it very well, and was back on the ground in just 16 minutes. Back on the ground hard - I bounced that landing pretty badly (unlike my other flights). I think it has to do with the sight picture from the rear seat of the Grob... it's kind of hard to tell exactly how close you are. Plus I had too much speed after my flare. Something to work on.

Later in the day the same two of us went up again, and he did twice as well as I had done... which is to say, we were down in a little more than a half hour! Narrow, rough lift... circling right on the edge of the stall, with lots of variation in speed trying to work the weak thermals. We tried to head up the valley to work the shear, but couldn't quite find it. For only the second time since I've started flying, I felt like I might get a little airsick. When I'm doing the flying, my visual and balance senses are much more in tune and it's never been a problem even with stalls and spins and hours of circling. But twice when I've been a passenger, it's gotten to me a bit. Hmm... both times with instructors, never with another private pilot. ;-) By consciously keeping my focus out of the cockpit, and trying to get some cool air, I got over it. (It did not help that my radio battery died and I had to look down for a some time while switching to a spare pack.)

Tehachapi Day 2

2009-05-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

Sunday started with an extensive discussion in the "map room" to help the newer pilots get oriented and learn how they would fly northard over the Sierras. The floor-to-ceiling relief map is a terrific tool for this kind of training! Unfortunately, the weather was not expected to be adequate for any XC flights today, the same as Saturday.

It actually was cooler and windier. Everyone who went up early agreed that the lift was not working in the mountains but found shear line lift in the valley, but only up to 7200' MSL. Winds were about 15 knots but pretty straight down the runway.

About 3:30 I took a friend of a student pilot up for a flight. It wasn't his first glider flight; he'd been up one other time. Very bumpy on tow, but my passenger didn't mind. We got off tow at about 2200' AGL (6400 MSL) into lift and got up about 7200' right away. We flew around for a little while with a 1-26, but did not find much to keep us up. The wind was strong and took us down the valley very quickly. Pretty soon we were scratching around at pattern altitude and heading in.

The 1-26 was way below us... He must have been at 600 or 700 feet AGL when he entered the pattern, well below the usual 800 to 1000. Since he was ahead of us, I made an early decision to use the power runway since I didn't know if he would clear the glider runway. I'm glad I did, because there would not have been room.

Wind on final approach was pretty fierce but fortunately not crossways, and I made a good landing well into the runway. I was able to taxi all the way to the taxiway closest to our tiedown area.

I was surprised to find that the total flight time was only 15 minutes... It felt like we soared longer than that. But with only a 2200 foot tow with a pretty quick climb rate, and a fast downwind in the pattern, I guess that adds up. Better luck tomorrow, I hope.

Tehachapi Day 1

2009-05-23T22:09:00.000-07:00

I've had some busy weeks with business trips and my daughter's wedding so I haven't flown or blogged for a while. This weekend our clup is on a trip to Tehachapi, one of our favorite soaring locations. They brought the Grob 103 and a Blanik L13, and we have about 13 or so club members (several with their own ships).

Today was nice, a bit windy, which caused some pilots some trouble on takeoffs. Some people got thermals to 11,000' right off tow. I went up in the Grob with a student pilot. I did all the flying, he shot some video. We let off tow at about 8,400' and soon found a thermal up to 9,350' over the foothills. We went back to the higher hills and could not connect with any more thermals. But we did get quite a bit of what I think was anabatic lift: layers of heated air coming off the sides of the mountains and converging off the tops of the ridges. Because of the direction of the wind, and where we found downdrafts, I'm pretty sure it was not the orographic kind that people usually call "ridge lift". Anabatic is only found right above the "spine" and peak of a slope, and it's not wide enough to circle in. When you're in it, it feels kind of magic: you're heading right toward the mountain, and the mountain is lifting you up as you go! The highest we got in this kind of lift was about 8,500'.

When that started to dwindle, we headed out over the valley but did not find much. We ended up with a 45 minute flight. Wind during the landing was pretty stiff, 15 to 20 knots, but straight up the runway.

Lift Under Overcast

2009-04-11T19:59:00.000-07:00

The day did not live up to the forecast. The day after a minor cold front went through... cold temperatures aloft... forecast for a high in the low 60's but with only 35-45% cloud cover. Depending on which sounding you believe, the lift could go to 7,000' or 9,000' MSL. Unfortunately it was 100% cloud cover until about noon. It cleared over the valley for maybe an hour, but was still 85% cloudy. It was fairly warm in the areas where the sun hit (well, it helped that I was wearing a black coat).

I was planning to just do a flight to practice some of the maneuvers for my Commercial practical test. I needed to work on some slips, especially switching from one side to the other. And I wanted to work on maintaining constant speed when using spoilers. Both of those use up altitude, so I was hoping for some sustaining lift. I found some weak lift up to 1-2 knots, generally just a few hundred feet below the darkest clouds. (Of course, I stayed 500 feet below them.) Having my clip-on audio vario was helpful. I never gained more than 200-300 feet at a time, but it was enough to extend my flight to 31 minutes from a 3000' tow, even with me doing some slips and spoiler tests. (You need to nose down just a bit when deploying the spoilers in the Blanik, or you lose a little airspeed. That's something my instructor wanted me to smooth out.) I think the valley floor was still radiating the heat that it absorbed during that hour or so of noontime sun.

One of the things I needed to practice was flying the whole pattern and landing with no drag devices. I made sure to get to the Initial Point with plenty of altitude. Then I hit a big distraction as I was trying to get lined up for my downwind leg. I found that I could not lock the retractable landing gear in the down position, because my water bottle in my cargo-pants pocket was in the way. I fooled around with it and had to actually move the stick way left to get my leg out of the way, and that messed up my speed and direction and attitude a bit.

The wind was from the right, but not directly, which meant that a right-wing-down slip would be used on the downwind and base legs. That went really well. Since I would need to reverse my slip on the final leg, I got out of the slip, did a coordinated turn to final, and then left-wing slipped on final. When I decided to come out of that one, I found that my speed was WAY up (the airspeed indicator is incorrect during slips), probably over 65 knots (should have been 55). I was down to a hundred feet or so, so I reduced my speed, used spoilers and landed right in the box. I think I bounced it a little, but stopped right in the first box as required for the Commercial test.

Other than the speed control on short final, not a bad little flight on a very gray day.

100 Hours

2009-04-09T23:33:00.000-07:00

I just updated my logbook spreadsheet, and noticed that my last flight took me to just over 100 hours.

That may not sound like a lot compared to what power pilots rack up. In gliding we do a lot of short flights. A half hour to an hour is typical for a gliding or soaring flight. The "pattern" flights during training, rope breaks (emergency landing practice) annual checkrides, etc. really bring down the average, and my occasional 2- to 3-hour cross-country flight does not offset them very much. I have a total of 227 flights, for an average of about 26 minutes each.

A Bad Flight and a Good Flight

2009-03-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

The forecast was for good lift to perhaps 8000', clear skies, and light winds. I planned to fly once or twice in the Blanik to work on the stuff I mentioned last week. After I spent an hour orienting another pilot on the PW5, it was early afternoon. Dust devils were popping off. Glass ships were staying up. Since I planned to do some extensive slips at altitude, I was glad to see that there was good lift so I wouldn't be down right away. Yeah, right.

I did a wing-down takeoff. I passed through some good lift at 3000' AGL and released, but could not connect with the thermal. I hunted all around but could only find light sink or zero sink. I could see several gliders about a thousand feet higher than me, but could never find an elevator to take me up. Pretty soon I was back at the Initial Point, without having practiced anything except some steep turns. I figured at least I could practice slipping the whole pattern (flying the whole approach without flaps or spoilers). Yeah, right.

I found nothing but sink all through the pattern. Not drastic, but definitely down. It was as if the glider was really dragging. No flaps, no spoilers, no slipping - flying as efficiently as I could. I couldn't abbreviate the downwind much because there was a towplane landing in front of me. By the time I was approaching the base turn, I was seriously low. I made an angled base leg that headed me right for the landing area, and came in lower than I ever have before. Safe, but barely, after 24 minutes.

A friend of a friend had come out for a first glider flight. Since he's already a Commercial power pilot, he was eager to do some thermaling, no qualms about lots of circling. We let off at 4,500 MSL in lift and this time got right in it. We easily got up to about 6,500 feet. We cruised around a bit and I let him fly straight and some easy turns. Later we found more thermals that took us up to 7,800'. He had a great time. The air was clear, the ground is still green, and the airfield and other areas are full of flowers. I had to force the glider down with spoilers and some fast turns to increase drag. This time we were in lift on the whole downwind leg (go figure!) so I at least got to practice a long slip. We came in for a very smooth landing, right within the first box, for a 1:06 total flight time. He was very happy to have had a good first glider flight, and I was glad that my whole day wasn't ruined by that first fiasco.

Commercial Practical test flights - whew!

2009-03-18T21:12:00.000-07:00

Today I did four flights with instructor X to begin preparing for my Commercial Practical test: a low pattern flight (which was supposed to be a no-surprise rope break except X forgot), a rope break, a high tow, and higher-than-pattern tow. I thought I would be mostly working on showing X the sequence of maneuvers that I described here, but as it turns out, there's a lot more that I need to work on. Some of it was new, some I've done before but not a lot or not for a long time, and some was stuff that I need to do more precisely.

New stuff:

Wing-down takeoffs. X says that I should be prepared to do all my test flights this way, because obviously a lot of paid rides are done that way. I've only done about three of those before - our club instructors weren't teaching them much when I started out. On my first two, my attitude control was not so good. The last two were fine.
Incipient stalls. I've been practicing real stalls, and that's not what they want to see on this test. I need to call out the signs of a stall about to happen, and then prevent the stall.
Full pattern with no drag devices. This was the big surprise. On the Private, they wanted to see slipping to a landing starting with the turn to the base leg, through about half of the final approach. That meant slip on base leg, turning slip to final, and slip on just the early part of final. For Commercial, they want to see no flaps or spoilers all the way from pattern entry. That means, if you enter the pattern at the normal height, slipping all the way down the downwind leg, and down to within 100' of the ground on final. I guess I've never tried to do a slip and maintain a ground track, so slipping all the way through the downwind leg was challenging. I was only using about half the aileron and rudder that I could have been, so X took over and demonstrated it on one flight, and then I did it on the next flight.

One of the tricky parts is that the direction of the slip may change several times, depending on the wind direction. For example:
- Wind is from from the left on downwind, so left-wing-down forward slip.
- Then right-wing-down slip turning right to the base leg.
- Then forward-slipping whichever direction makes sense on base.
- Then right-wing-down slip turning right to final.
- Then right-wing-down slip on final (since direction of the wind has reversed from the downwind leg).
I screwed that up in a couple of places, because entering a slip has never been natural for me... I always have to think which direction for stick and which for rudder. Switching several times in a row was tough. So now that I know, I'll need to practice this!
Slack line removal - revised! X got a bunch of slack in the towline and handed it over to me to resolve. I did it the way I was taught, and X did not like it a bit. After the second attempt, we discussed it and I found out they've completely changed the way they teach it! I was taught to yaw away from the tow plane, then gently realign just before the slack comes out. I'm really smooth at that - except when an instructor interrupts me in the middle of the maneuver telling me I'm doing it all wrong. Nowadays they say to point the nose directly at the tow plane, and wait for the slack to come out. So... something else to go up and practice.

Stuff that went well:

Accuracy landing
Steep turns

At the outset, X said "I'm going to be nitpicking because that's what the examiner will be doing." I was a bit surprised at stuff I thought I was doing well that I need to clean up:

Rope break. OK, but I should have sped up more before the turn. I was pretty high, and (as mentioned above), getting into a slip to lose height took me a couple of tries. After that, the landing was good.
Boxing the wake. Need to use more rudder and less aileron. I haven't done this with an instructor for a long time, so I guess I've formed some bad habits.
Airbrake check. I didn't pay attention to attitude/airspeed during the check, and got dinged for it. This is a smoothness/comfort thing.
Slow flight including turns. My slow flight has always been fine. But X wanted to see my turns be much shallower than I was doing them.
Entering turns. I sometimes turn first and then adjust my airspeed once the turn is established. I should plan ahead and adjust the speed as I start the turn. Another smoothness/comfort thing.

I knew the tolerances would be tighter, but really had not known there were so many areas where the expectations would be higher. It all makes sense, but it means I'll need to go up and practice all this stuff. And it meant I was working hard, because so little of it was "automatic".

After all that, I helped push planes in and out for others... lifted some Blanik wings onto a trailer... did some maintenance on the Blanik... and spent about an hour teaching a student about the PW5. By the time I left, I was pooped. That's partly 'cuz it was a hot day - 92F in the shade when I left at 4:00!

FOI Test

2009-03-14T14:19:00.001-07:00

One of the two "written" tests for Flight Instructor is the Fundamentals of Instruction. This covers a variety of topics regarding teaching in general (it does not cover aeronautics and the other content that one will actually teach). The FAA textbook that teaches this material is the Aviation Instructor's Handbook.

Topics covered include:

- teaching methods
- ground instruction lesson plans
- flight instruction (demonstration/performance etc.)
- how people learn
- basic psychology (needs hierarchy etc.)
- defense mechanisms
- critiques
- evaluations
- types of tests

I have found the material to be a little - I don't know - arbitrary? I mean it states some things as definite that I think are open to interpretation. There could be several ways of saying something, but the test questions use some very specific language that you just have to know and not argue with.

In addition to studying that book, I got the ASA Test Prep book and their Prepware software. Although the book contains the test questions and answers, I like to use the software because it makes the scoring much easier, and because it composes practice tests with random sets of questions.

ASA updates it each year to stay current with the FAA test questions. A couple weeks ago I learned that the FAA issued a new edition of the Aviation Instructor's Handbook late in 2008, so I quickly ordered a copy. The 2009 Prepware does not include any of the new material, so I asked ASA if the FAA test includes it, and they said it does not.

Unlike the Private Pilot knowledge test, you don't need an instructor endorsement to go take the test. The test is 50 questions drawn from a pool of 190. Passing grade is 70%. In a study session covering all 190 questions, I got 91%. In practice tests of 50 questions, I got 98% and 96%.

Last week I found in my favorite used bookstore an old copy of The Flight Instructor's Manual from 1974. Perfect timing! As I mentioned, I found the AIH to be kind of artificial and not as useful as I'd like. And the ASA Test Prep for Flight Instructor is much like the one for Commercial Pilot: a lot on aeronautics and regulations but not much on HOW TO TEACH STUDENTS TO FLY. This FIM book seems to combine the two into a much more useful guide.

The more I read the FIH, the more I think that author, William Kershner, actually wrote much of the FAA's AIH. (The AIH does not credit any individuals.) The terms used are exactly the same, but the FIM goes into more depth and makes it all so much more practical. So far I'm just three chapters into it

Since ASA said the FAA 2009 test does not cover any of the new material, I went ahead and took the FOI test yesterday although I have not finished the 2008 AIH (scenario-based training etc.). Most of it went fine. I got stuck on 3 closely related questions on defense mechanisms. By comparing the questions and answers for all three, I chose what I thought were the best answers. I was either going to get them all right, or all wrong.

I got 100%.

Ground School, and Grounded

2009-02-28T21:19:00.000-08:00

Today our club started a 6-week ground school for club members and newcomers, and as a student CFI I got to teach a couple of sessions. Just like last year, I taught on Weight & Balance, and Preflight Inspection. I think it went pretty well, except that I really could have used more time. Each was planned to be 30 minutes, but we went for 1:20 and could have gone longer. There were nine "official" students and two or three that were kind of observing. I think everyone enjoyed it and learned a lot - good discussion and good questions. I got good feedback from a couple of participants and our Chief CFI.

I also worked with a pre-solo student on some of his homework questions regarding aerodynamics. Coincidentally, I had been thinking about his first question the other day, and how I would explain it. Grabbing a little balsa glider that we keep around as an instructional aid, I gave him some hints that helped a light bulb go on over his head. I really enjoy that kind of stuff.

Later in the day I was to fly with our Chief CFI to do some prep work for my Commercial practical test. You have to do 10 flights with an instructor within 60 days of taking the practical test, and this was to have been the first. As I was strapping in in the rear seat, I found a major mechanical problem which, upon further inspection, showed damage to the static system. So that ship is grounded for now, until some prehistoric tubing can be replaced. I worked closely with our Maintenance Officer, so I learned a bit more about how the Blanik L13 instrument panel and static system are put together.

Since the above-mentioned CFI is going on some trips in March, I won't get to do many of those required flights for a while. So I'm probably looking at taking the practical in late April. I think I may focus heavily on preparing for the Fudamentals of Instruction written test in the meantime so I can keep making progress. I plan to buy the ASA Test Prep CD for Flight Instructor. I have the book from a couple years ago, and I like studying from the book rather than on the computer. But I found that the software version helps a lot when taking practice tests, because it handles the scoring automatically.

Work day and a practice flight

2009-02-21T22:13:00.000-08:00

The forecast was for broken cirrus clouds and little lift. Actually it was unbroken thick cirrus, so there was no lift to be had. That was fine with me, my plan was to do a high tow and practice maneuvers for my commercial practical test. I need to log 10 solo flights specifically in preparation for the test, and I have 4 logged so far.

Few people were flying, because it was an unofficial club "work day", with projects involving deck roof repair, trailer repair, radio installation, and general trash cleanup around our operating area. Also, the club is beginning a "Duty Officer" function to schedule student flights and help make the instructors' job easier and more efficient. I helped design the role, and volunteered to be DO on the first day. So I didn't work on any of the big projects, but I did some general trash pickup and a lot of glider pushing.

I took a Blanik up on a high tow in the mid-afternoon, to run through the practical test steps. Here's an abbreviated list of what is generally done on a practical test (from a 4000' tow) to demonstrate all the required tasks:

Box the wake
Slack line control
Signal tow plane for turn
360 degree turn to heading
720 degree turn to heading,clearing turn
Straight stall w/o brakes
Straight stall with brakes
Turning stall w/o brakes
Turning stall with brakes
Slow flight
Slow turns, right & left
Straight flight @ min sink
Straight flight @ best L/D
Speed to fly in sink
Thermal soaring if possible
Pattern, including all radio calls
Land & stop in the designated box

All the airwork went fine, and I was surprised to find that I only used up 1,000' doing all the turns and four stalls. I worked on making my turns steeper. I found a little zero sink but no workable lift, so my flight was 24 minutes long.

Before my flight, the previous student and instructor noted a significant loss of wheel braking power. We could see that the brake actuator was not moving quite the way it should. I decided that it would be OK to fly, but to plan on landing as short as possible to leave a lot of stopping space. As it turned out, the brake was totally inoperable. With my airbrakes fully out, and no wheel braking, I used up the entire landing zone and then some, stopping about halfway between the zone and the taxiway (which is our don't-go-there limit because of the hump it presents). But I was expecting it, so since there were no other gliders in the landing zone it was not really a problem. So much for landing within the tolerance of the commercial test!

BFR via Winch Launch

2009-02-01T21:53:00.000-08:00

It's biennial Flight Review time! I tried to arrange to do it in January but due to a last-minute mixup with an instructor, it didn't work out. Then last week was almost winch launching and weird scheduling... The requirement for the Flight Review is either an hour of flight time or three launches to pattern altitude. So we decided that three winch launches would do the trick! Since I was last up last week and didn't get to launch, the group let me go first today and graciously let me get in three flights. (After that I did "Line Boss" again for everyone else's flights.)

Flight 1: I'd forgotten just how fast the winch accelerates the glider. Zero to about 55 mph in about 3 seconds. That really gets your attention! Nice, smooth rotation into the 45-degree climb. It took me a little while to get the hang of the speed adjustment, but once I got in the groove it was very stable at 50 knots indicated airspeed (on my front indicator, 55 knots on the back one). The cable back-released at 1,000' AGL.

Flight 2: The startup acceleration didn't catch me by surprise this time. Another smooth climb to 1,000' AGL. I didn't time it, but it really only takes about 30 seconds at that speed and angle. I tell people that have been to Disney's California Adventure that it's much like the California Screamin' roller coaster, with its quick acceleration into a 45-degree climb - but 10 times as high! There was absolutely no wind, or we probably would have gone higher faster.

Flight 3: This time I could really detect the round-over at the top of the climb and released at 1,100' AGL. That was high enough to do a few turns before entering the pattern for landing (since the instructor wants to see more than just up-and-down). No lift of course; these flights were from about 8:20 to 9:00 a.m.

My instructor was well pleased with my launches, flights, and landings, so that took care of my BFR flights and the club's annual checkride requirement. And at $15 per launch, this was much less expensive than three aerotows! Our club pres was rather pleased that we're already demonstrating the value of winch launching.

We spent some ground time later on going over my missed questions from Friday's Commercial written test. That, along with some reading and q-and-a, covered the ground training requirement for the BFR.

I spent much of the rest of the day pushing gliders in and out, and wing running for club members and other pilots. It turned out to be a quite soarable day, with the temperature up in the low 80's.

Commercial Pilot Knowledge Test

2009-01-30T18:11:00.000-08:00

We all call it the "written" test 'cuz it's not the oral or flight test. It's actually a computer-delivered test with 100 multiple-choice questions, up to 3 hours allowed. Minimum passing grade is 70%. (Now THAT's a scary thought...)

Unfortunately it includes some subject areas that really don't apply to glider pilots, so I've spent a lot of time studying and practice-testing those areas. It's hard to learn those areas because they're all abstract knowledge to me. Things like radio navigation with VOR's and NDB's - I've never seen either one, so I have no real-world experience to confirm what I read about. Things like Class B and Class C airspace - I don't and won't fly there, so that stuff just doesn't stick. No way I'm going to get 100%. I figure if I'm really solid on all the glider stuff and the stuff that applies, then missing a few questions on those topics will only pull my grade down a little. The best I did on the ASA computerized practice test was 97%.

I passed with a 95% score. As I recall, when I took my Private Pilot written, I got 93%.

The test report doesn't tell you exactly which questions you missed, but gives some "Learning Statement Codes" which point you to general areas of knowledge. You have to get further instructional time on the areas missed. Amazingly, I didn't miss any of the VOR stuff! What I did miss were:

Airspace classes and info on a sectional chart. I remember being unsure about some Class E ceiling and boundary questions.
Airport signs and taxiiing techniques. Yeah... in six years, I've never taxied an aircraft at an airport that had signs, so I'm not surprised I'd miss a question on "destination signs".
PIC authority and responsibility. Not sure what that was... I'll have to look into that.

That means I got 100% on all the glider, weather, instrument and aerodynamic questions.

So now it's time to focus on getting ready for the Practical Test!

Almost Winched, and a Little Soaring

2009-01-25T17:39:00.001-08:00

Our club is beginning winch operations at our home airport, and this was week 2 of a 6-week startup and training program. The plan was to winch launch from 8 am until 11 am, before the commercial operation planned to start aerotowing. In the future we might be able to mix the two operations, but as we're starting up we need to stay well out of each other's way. I went to help out, and because I was hoping to do a soaring flight later in the day.

I did the job of "Line Boss" for a few launches, which involves coordinating the actions of the winch driver, wing runner, and pilot by radio. I've done this before at other club ground launch sites. I wasn't really planning to winch launch today, but a slot came open and I was up next. (I've winch launched a few times before, actually have an endorsement for it, but it's been a while and I planned to do it again with an instructor.) But the commercial op asked us to stand down from 10 to 11 so they could do a few aerotows for the other club. And the other club guys pushed out at 9:58 just as I was ready to go. Argh. We backed off and let them go, and for various reasons that was the end of our winching for the day.

I was able to squeeze in an aerotow flight in the Blanik between a couple of student sessions (most of the other members had left). The weather was very cloudy, after a mild rainstorm yesterday, but the forecast and conditions indicated there might be some lift. (Frequently on a "post-frontal" day the air is unstable and good for soaring.) If trigger temperature was reached, the lift could be 3 to 4 knots. Unfortunately the clouds covered about 80% or more of the sky, blocking solar heating. There was a fairly strong southwest wind, 11 to 17 knots at times, which some said would destroy the thermals. Well, yes, it can destroy the thermals, but it can also cause orographic lift even away from obvious ridges. Fortunately I had been watching the sky carefully all day and it appeared to me that some areas in and near a "blue hole" were generating some lift, and I wanted to check it out. (I really like to fly, even if it's a short flight.)

Of course, some big cumulus clouds are obviously directly caused by upslope winds over big mountains. And isolated puffy CU on a warm day can be obviously related to identifiable thermals. Smaller, near-overcast CU over a valley or area of hills can appear to be just floating by. But that's because the cloud motion and development happens on such a slow timescale that we humans don't easily see the patterns. If you watch some time-lapse movies of clouds, you can see that they are often developing in a fairly constant place, and then dissipating downwind and higher up. Not necessarily a predictable place, but often a noticeable place. You have to watch the sky for a while to see that happening in real time. In this photo, those cauliflower-shaped clouds on the other side of the lake were always in the same place even though it was windy, indicating a fairly steady-state flow in what looks like a random pattern of clouds. It seemed to me that the "blue hole" (to the right of this view) was in a fairly constant place, and the little clouds in and around it were stable and some had concave bases, indicating strong lift.

So up I went. I asked the tow pilot to take me up near cloudbase in that specific area. As we approached that zone, we went through some areas of lift. I released at 2100' AGL near a decent cloud. AWOS was reporting the ceiling at 2400', but I think it was higher. I found some pockets of fairly constant lift of 300 knots (correction: 300 feet per minute), with some short bursts of 6! The lift was small, too small to actually center. It was stronger under some of the big gray areas, but those clouds were fuzzy enough on the bottom that I didn't want to get too close. I never did get above release altitude (duh - there were clouds above me!) but I did play around with the lift for a little while. I also took some pictures, which probably contributed to my not staying in the lift very well. That was OK, because I knew there was a student waiting for me to come down. So I got an 18-minute flight. From a 2100' foot tow, a no-lift ride would be about 9 minutes.

Big planes and little planes

2009-01-11T18:06:00.000-08:00

Saturday there were Santa Ana winds all over the area. Fortunately, Hemet-Ryan airport is in a protected valley and the winds were light but variable. Weather charts predicted up to 40 knots at higher altitudes. J and I had arranged to fly dual in the Grob 103 even if it meant just doing some sled rides. Because I had to leave by 1:00, we knew we'd be going up before the thermals (if any) started cooking. J wanted to do the takeoffs and landings for currency purposes, which was fine with me. I flew from the back seat.

The first flight was pretty turbulent down low, smoother above 1000' AGL. The tow pilot took us further west than I thought made sense, given the east wind. We headed upwind to get to some low hills that we thought might have some thermals. At one point I looked down at the ground while I was flying at 45 knots, about minimum sink speed, and we were barely moving forward. Have you ever looked up at a bird that was just stationary flying into the wind? Yeah, that was us! The head wind was probably 35 knots or so. So we put the nose down to pick up speed and went off in search of lift. We didn't find much, and we were back down in 15 minutes. But I did get some practice tracking a heading with a strong crosswind.

On the second flight, we were just about 100' off the ground when we nearly passed under a hawk. Then BAM! we flew through a strong bit of turbulence, enough to bang my head on the canopy. I told J we should remember that spot in case we didn't find any other thermals. This time we steered the towplane northward so we would be flying downwind as we looked for lift. (Before takeoff, we had noticed a low-level wind from the south, so with that colliding with the Santa Ana from the northeast, we thought we might find a convergence to surf.) There were just little bumps, not enough to soar on, until we got back over the end of the runway where that big bump had been. Sure enough, we found enough "zero sink" to stretch out our flight for about 7 minutes, and ended up with a 22-minute flight.

So, not great flights, but it was fun to be up in the clear air and fly over the valley for a while.

The reason I needed to leave at 1:00 was to go work the SSA-OCSA booth at the Academy of Model Aeronautics annual convention in Ontario. We bring a glider (and this time our winch) to advertise "full-scale" soaring to the radio control pilots. Many of us glider guiders got our start in R/C, and it's a good source of new members - and a good next step for model pilots to think about. (I resisted the urge to stimulate the economy and buy another project... gotta focus on my Commercial for now!) It's a lot of fun talking with people and answering their questions about soaring and sailplanes.

New Year's Resolution

2009-01-01T18:12:00.000-08:00

I'm setting a goal of taking my Commercial written test by the end of January.

Review of 2008

2009-01-01T17:38:00.001-08:00

It's been a busy year. I accomplished some things I set out to do, made progress on others. Looking back at my log and blog, here are the highlights.

I had a total of 29 flights, including my 200th:

One flight with an instructor
Two flights with other Private pilots
Six flights with student pilots
One passenger flight
That leaves 19 solo flights, two of them cross-country.

I worked toward my Commercial and Instructor ratings. At the start of the year, I thought I would have taken at least the Commercial tests by now, but it has taken longer than I thought. I thought the material was similar enough that I would take both tests in close succession, but now I see that there is a lot more prep work to do for Instructor, so I'm focusing on Commercial.

In January-February, I attended a Commercial and Instructor ground school series run by the club.
Bought the ASA Commercial and Instructor test prep manuals and have worked with them quite a lot.
Bought the ASA Commercial test CD to make my self-scoring easier. On practice tests a couple of months ago, I scored 85% and 86%. I'd like to be at 95% before taking it for real.
Bought the BGA Gliding Theory of Flight manual, which is very helpful and interesting... I've read it 1.5 times. I'll need much of it for the Instructor work.
In Feb, I did some student teaching as part of our club's ground school. This required writing two lesson plans. I learned a *lot* about weight-and-balance calculations.
Downloaded many FAA Advisory Circulars to study
I've done a few flights with students, to get used to turning over the controls, observing, providing feedback... no teaching.

I kind of took the summer off from the Com/Instr track to do some cross-country work:

I did an out-and-back flight of about 41 miles (each way) out of Tehachapi which probably qualified for Silver badge distance and altitude.
I did a straight-out flight in the Dust Devil Dash from Tehachapi, landing safely on a dirt strip at Olancha about 84 miles away. This one was properly declared and logged, and was accepted by SSA for Silver distance and altitude. Placed 20th out of 22.

Other stuff:

Performed my first-ever solo spins
Got a good look at a the structure of a disassembled Blanik, did some reading to understand how those flimsy aluminum parts form a strong fuselage
Uploaded some flights to the On Line Contest for the first time
Built a PC with the Condor soaring simulator, joystick and pedals, for the club to use in ground instruction
Took first place in the club's Timed Flight event of our Family Soaring Contest (Um... not sure if anyone else entered... but it *was* within seconds of the 60-minute goal.)
First flight in "wave" lift (though at a very low altitude)
Had some good practice "porpoise" flying under cloud streets - pretty rare in our area
Wrote a letter of recommendation to the FAA which helped one of our flight instructors receive the Wright Brothers award for 50 years of safe flying.
Produced the club's "year in pictures" DVD.

All in all, I had a lot of good flights at Hemet and Techachapi. Whether due to better luck with the weather, or improving soaring skill on my part, I felt I did not get "skunked" nearly as often this year.

Two nice dual flights

2008-12-27T22:20:00.001-08:00

Today the air was crystal clear, providing wonderful views of the snow on the mountains to the north and east. But due to about 50% cirrus cloud cover, it never got warm enough for good soaring. I was determined to fly regardless of lift! (Also, I got a tiny new camera recently and wanted to try it out.)

N, one of the students in the club, has passed his written test for the Private Pilot license and wanted to start to practice for the Practical test. He asked me to fly with him and tell him what maneuvers to demonstrate. I have a list of them, so after going over the list in some detail, up we went. (You can just see the towplane and the mountains in this shot.)

We found just a little lift on the first flight, keeping us up for 30 minutes from a 4000' tow. The second flight was not so lucky, essentially no lift and a 23 minute flight.

The list of tasks for the Practical is pretty long - it's quite a bit to accomplish in a single flight. N did nearly all of the tasks on both flights.

1. Aero tow
a. Box the wake when above 300' AGL
b. Slack line control
c. Signal the tow plane for turn, speed up, or slow down
2. Release at 5500' MSL (4000' AGL)
3. Steep turns
a. One 360 degrees
b. One 720 degrees
c. Complete turn on a specified heading
d. Final turn serves as one clearing turn
4. Stalls
a. Straight ahead with and without dive brakes
b. Turning (left and right) with and without dive brakes
5. Slow flight - 35 knots
a. Straight ahead flight
b. Left and right 90 degree turns
6. Straight ahead flight
a. Minimum sink speed
b. Best L/D speed
c. Speed to fly if in sink
7. Thermal soaring
8. Approach to glider area of runway 22
a. Slip on base or final without dive brakes
b. Use of radio
9. Land in designated box

So I got to fly for nearly an hour with a friend, practice some instructor skills, and split the tow fees. Not bad! The only downside to dual flights with students is that I can only log as PIC the time that I am actually flying the plane, which in today's case was only about 5 minutes per flight.

Thinking about lift

2008-12-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about lift lately. Not the kind of lift that glider pilots seek out (upward moving air), but the kind of lift that both airplane and glider pilots care about: the lift generated by the wing.

All pilots, and most passengers, at some level want to know "What makes an airplane fly?" The wing, obviously! Since I want to be an instructor, I should be able to explain what enables a wing to fly. I've read a number of sources, and am still unsatisfied with the explanations.

Most sources talk about Bernoulli's principle (why the top of the wing causes lift) and/or Newton's law of reaction (why the bottom of the wing causes lift). Some synthesize the two, and speculate on what proportion of each effect causes the most lift. Some introduce "circulation". Eventually they all start getting vague and say that the reason a wing accelerates air that flows over the top surface can't be easily explained and mumble something about Euler's equations, as if that will help.

Stick and Rudder, otherwise a fantastic book, simply says "It shoves the air down with its bottom surface, and it pulls the air down with its top surface; the latter action is the more important." Langeweische says a lot about how lift varies with Angle of Attack - he is much more concerned with how to fly the wing than with why the wing flies.

See How It Flies Section 3, Airfoils and Airflow, is filled with wonderful diagrams of stream lines:

and talks a lot about the timing of the parcels of air. Like other books, it tries to correct the false notion that the air flowing over the top of the wing "must" move faster in order to meet up with corresponding parcels flowing below. That makes sense - there's nothing tying the two flows together.

Later, Denker talks about circulation but never explains it. He starts with the idea of air circulating around a stationary wing on the ground (artificially stirred by a paddle), then expects us to accept that circulation continues during flight. I'm sorry, but I don't think there's any air making its way around the trailing edge from the top to the bottom and flowing forward - it's all flowing past the trailing edge. In fact he makes that point himself by discussing the stagnation point at the trailing edge. He and other sources seem to say that circulation is a mathematical construct to explain pressure differences, not a real circulation around the wing. Huh?

Aerofoils and Wings explains a lot about how different wings behave, but as far as lift generation goes, Brandon just refers us to Denker. Later, "As the air accelerates away from the stagnation line, the local airflow over the upper surface gains a greater speed than the lower." We're supposed to take this on faith? What makes it accelerate so much? OK, it accelerates upward because the leading edge forces the air up over the top surface. But why would air flowing below the wing not also accelerate? It's being pushed down, just as the air over the top is being pushed up (due to the Angle of Attack), but I suppose not as much.

In the January 2009 issue of AOPA Flight Training, "The Magic of Lift" can't seem to decide whether or not air meets up at the trailing edge at the same time. Christensen spends some time trying to explain why air traveling faster has lower pressure, using a car-traffic analogy. That's a useful analogy, but only if you assume that the air above must move faster because it has to get to the trailing edge at the same time as the air below. He starts to debunk that idea and then reverts back to it.

But at least Christensen considers the wing from what I think is a better point of view. Most texts describe a stationary wing, and a moving flow of air. I think that's because wind tunnels have been used for years to study airfoils (it's easier than observing airflow by looking down the tip of a moving wing!). But in flight, the wing moves and the air is still. Most texts would claim that the two situations can be described by the same laws. But I'm not so sure... I think the behavior of the air may be different, primarily because of inertia and ambient pressure.

The air has stationary inertia (it must be shoved out of the way by the wing), it doesn't have inertia of motion. As the air is shoved out of the way, wouldn't its pressure be increased, rather than decreased as is assumed in the air-moving-faster-over-the-wing model? He states that as the air comes back down after the wing has passed, it "now possesses momentum, causing the air to overshoot ... resulting in the downwash." I get that. But what started it moving downward - isn't it the ambient pressure of the air above it that is being shoved against? I think of the air as squishy, and once the wing gets out of the way, the air is squished back downward.

According to Bernoulli, moving air has lower pressure. But it seems to me that it may not have lower pressure in all directions. A parcel of air moving upward, being shoved out of the way by the top surface of the leading edge, may have lower pressure horizontally, but wouldn't it have higher pressure vertically? After all, it's being squeezed between the wing and the air above it. Once it gets moving at a constant rate, maybe... but as it's accelerating, it seems to me the pressure in the vertical direction would be higher. (I remember reading a description of pitot tubes and venturis that made me think of it this way... I'll have to look for it.)

NASA cops out and fails to provide a good explanation, too. They spend a lot of time explaining flow patterns and have some great interactive illustrations, but in the end they just say "The real details of how an object generates lift are very complex and do not lend themselves to simplification. For a gas, we have to simultaneously conserve the mass, momentum, and energy in the flow. ... To truly understand the details of the generation of lift, one has to have a good working knowledge of the Euler Equations."

But equations merely quantify physical phenomena. Mass is moved around by energy, not by numbers. There must be a way to explain what the air is doing, without getting into the details of how much. Langeweische did such a tremendous job of explaining phenomena and behaviors without invoking mathematics - I wish he had tackled this aspect as well.

Some texts also get into bound vortices (the full extension of what we pilots usually call "wingtip vortices"), and I think this aspect is far more important in explaining lift than most authors do. To put it as simply as I can, if some air is shoved downward (whether by Bernoulli and suction on the top, or Newton and deflection on the bottom), that displaced air must be replaced by air from above. You can't leave a hole in the air - that's a vacuum, and as we all know, Nature hates vacuuming. The most natural way for the ambient air to fill it is from a circular region above and around the hole. Then that gap is filled by air from below the circular region (all around the original hole). Then that circular gap is filled by the original shoved-down air spreading out. Viola - a donut-shaped flow of air - like a smoke ring. And due to inertia, it keeps on vortexing until it's diluted.

I have to think about this a little more, and find some good diagrams of it. It's almost got me believing in circulation again. The BGA Gliding: Theory of Flight has a good diagram of the donut shape of the bound vortex (Chapter 3 Figure 40), but again I think the bound vortex is partly a mathematical abstraction. I really don't think air flows forward under the wing!

So, writing this out, I think I've arrived at a conclusion. Why does the air accelerate over the top of the wing? Because it's been given energy by the leading edge, shoving it out of the way. Where did it get that energy? In the case of an airplane, it comes from the engine shoving the wing forward. In the case of a glider, it comes from gravity pulling the glider and wing downward-forward. The ultimate purpose of the wing is to transfer energy from the (engine or falling fuselage) into downward-moving air at the trailing edge, which shoves the wing upward. Most texts talk about the flow of the air over a stationary wing, as if the air has the energy. I think the wing has the energy, the leading edge forces the air up, then the compressed air above forces the displaced air back down past the trailing edge. The displaced air takes the energy with it, causing a vortex. Somehow Newton's action-reaction law gets invoked to cause the wing to go up - still not sure why. I think air moves the wing up, not old Newton. I'll have to think on this some more.

I have no aerodynamic training, just what I've read along the way to becoming a pilot and an instructor. If you have some insight into this topic, please comment! If I'm all wet, I'd like to know where I've got it wrong. But I really care about what mass and energy do. Analogies don't hold wings up. Equations quantify but don't explain. It has to make sense.

Some work and a sled ride

2008-11-22T18:32:00.000-08:00

Today the weather forecast was really iffy. Light winds, and lift could go to 7000', but incoming cirrus clouds could spoil it.

The PW5 needed a little work, so I tackled these in the morning:

The battery wires were fraying. A and I put new lugs on the ends.
The gust locks for the ailerons needed new foam and bungee cord. We'd been using rags as padding for a few months!
Replaced the long rear bungee cord on the canopy cover.
The O2 system had been left turned on, so the battery was dead. A kindly went to town for a battery.

Some of the student pilots are coming to me with questions about procedures and resources. Without actually getting into ground school, I explain what I can. As one pointed out (and as I've blogged about), many of the books tell you what but they really don't explain the why. For example, one wanted to know about radio procedures on the UNICOM frequency in the landing pattern. What do you need to say, and in what sequence? Why in that sequence?

1. First, say who you're addressing, e.g. "Hemet traffic:" Why first? To get the attention of people who may not be fully listening. You're saying, "Hemet traffic, listen up!"

2. Next, who you are. "Glider two papa delta..." If you said this first, then who you're addressing, people would miss your call sign because they didn't start listening until they heard "Hemet traffic." Listeners aren't fully listening all the time.

3. Where you are. "Entering 45 for..."

4. What you are going to do. I get really specific because we gliders share the airport with power traffic, and they are most of the radio traffic. They're on the other runway (23) and they do a left pattern (which they don't specify). I want them to understand where I am going and that I'm not conflicting with them. "... right-hand pattern to runway two two." I emphasize the second two because they're normally listening for "two three".

5. Finish with who you're addressing. "Hemet". In case #1 got cut off, or was garbled, or they really weren't listnening at the beginning.
Once you understand the why of the sequence, it's easy to remember!

A had not flown the PW5 for a while so I went over the controls and features with him. He took off before noon and had a nice hour-long flight. Unfortunately, he used up all the lift. ;-)

I let off in lift but could not get back into it. The cloud cover had gotten thicker and there was very little sunlight hitting the ground. All I found was about 3 knots of sinking air. Near the Initial Point at about 1300' AGL I found a little weak lift but it was not even big enough to complete a circle in. I ended up with an 18-minute ride. Bummer! After about 2:00, most people were not staying up any more.

At least my landing was good. There was maybe a 4-knot headwind at most. I think I touched down right on the line, and stopped well within the first box. I think what made the difference was that I picked out my aiming point as soon as I turned base, and kept checking my angle to it all the way on the base leg. I think I've been looking elsewhere on base leg, and then not being at the right altitude when turning final. By establishing my aim point on base, the base and final legs are all part of the same glide slope.

Landings

2008-11-08T21:52:00.000-08:00

One of the requirements for the Commercial practical test is landings twice as precise as for the Private certificate. The Practical Test Standard says "stopping short of and within 100 feet of a designated point". I'm told that at our field, that translates to touching down and stopping within the first of our two landing boxes, which I think is about 500 feet long. I've had some issues with touching down too soon, i.e. short of the box, and I've been planning to work on this for some time. But the weather conditions have been pretty good lately, so I've tended to go soaring rather than spend time (and money) on landing practice.

I really need to practice this in a Blanik, since that's what I'll take the test in, but one was busy with students all day and the other had its control surfaces removed for replacement of the fabric, so I decided to practice in the PW5. It's different from the Blanik: lighter, doesn't have flaps, and is different in many ways, but my problem hasn't been with those aspects. My problem has simply been the glidepath to the aiming point. For some reason I tend to pick an aiming point too far downwind from the box border, making it so I have to float too far. In other words, I have tended to come down too steeply during the base and final legs.

Flight #1: I let off at the Initial Point at 1000' AGL. In lift! By the time I got to the point of turning base, I was STILL at nearly 1000'! I extended my downwind leg much further than usual. Full spoilers and forward slip and turning slip brought me down steeply, but again my roundout point was too far downwind. The standard advice is to not adjust spoilers after rounding out, but sometimes I do close them slightly to slow the sink rate. At least with the PW5, that's hard to get right, and it's easy to balloon up a bit. I touched down about 15' short of the line. Braking on the ground was very good (there was about a 6-knot headwind component), and stopping smoothly within the first box was easy. (Speed control is crucial to touching down with little energy, making for a short rollout. This I seem to have no problem with.)

Flight #2: This time I didn't have a bunch of lift on downwind, and had a more normal pattern and approach. Speed was right on, didn't have to mess with spoilers, just kept easing the stick back and floating... floating... floating... touched down about 1-2 feet short of the line. Good rollout again.

Flight #3: I decided to do a normal tow and do some soaring. Gotta have some fun, right? Uneventful flight: let off in lift, went up to about 5800' MSL, didn't find any other major lift. Nice clear day! A bit of lift on downwind, but not nearly as much as the first flight. Speed was a little high but I fixed it. Touchdown was... hmm... I don't really remember, I think still about a foot short of the line. Rollout again was nice and short. The wind was just right to "ground fly" balanced on the wheels for about 30 seconds or so.

On all three flights, I think I only used about 2/3 of the first box - the PW5 really stops short and smooth. So... I should definitely move my aiming point even more upwind on the field, to float further into the box, at least when there's a light headwind. I think that's part of the problem: trying to estimate how much the wind will help kill the float - maybe I'm underestimating that aspect. And flying all three different aircraft doesn't help. They're all different weights and different glide ratios, so adjusting for multiple variables is tricky. When I can nail landings in the first box in both Blanik and PW5, in varying wind conditions, then I'll know I'm ready for the practical. (Not a chance in the Grob - it's way too heavy and its wheel brake is weak. I was lucky to stop it in about 1200' a few weeks ago.)