I haven't flown for 3 weeks but am still doing "flying" stuff:
3 weeks ago: Camping at the beach, slope-soared my R/C glider on the cliffs. I have a 2-meter foamie Highlander which I fly occasionally... it takes quite a strong wind to keep it up. I had to replace the stabilizer/rudder due to some wear-and-tear and then a botched repair job. The night we arrived there was a pretty good storm, and the next day had an excellent wind perpendicular to the cliffs. I had three great flights, and great landings. I only get to fly it a few times a year now that I'm mostly flying "full-scale", so this was a treat. Especially since the weather at Hemet was cold and rainy.
2 weeks ago: We declared a Work Day at the club, so no flying. It was a day with not much lift anyway, but again it was right after a storm and there were some terrific winds aloft. We watched lennies all day long and wished we were wave-flying instead of glider-waxing. But with lousy thermal conditions we wouldn't have reached the wave anyway... and the could not have gotten back to the airport due to the wind direction.
This week: The club set up a recruiting booth at a local air show, taking along the PW5. It rained all morning but then cleared up midday, so the show went on. Those shows are always fun. And we get to talk up soaring to lots of interested visitors.
Next week: IF the rain quits, and IF the recent rain haven't flooded it, we're planning a club field trip to Coyote Dry Lake for auto-towing and perhaps winch-launching. The club is acquiring a winch, and this may be our first chance to try it out. But I'm betting we scrub the trip... it's probably not a dry lake at this point.
3 comments:
I was flying those lennies last weekend, behind San Jacinto, all the way up to San Gorgonio. If I could make it back to Warner Springs from there, you could have made it back to Hemet. Winds were no more than 50 kts. You can penetrate a 50 kt headwind quite a distance from 18,000 ft.
Cool! I'm glad someone made use of that awesome wave! I'm looking forward to that kind of flying sometime. I have flown thermal and shear and ridge and anabatic, but no wave yet.
I've never been in or adjacent to that kind of cloud structure. From the ground it's kind of hard to figure out exactly how the clouds relate to each other. They looked "stacked", so I'm wondering whether they were truly on top of each other (multiple layers of the wave), or whether they are horizontally distributed and just LOOK like they are stacked up.
They were really "stacked" (insert your own off-color joke here). If you wanted, you could have flown in between the layers in some places. I wouldn't try it without a horizon though, they could close in on you in an instant.
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