Landing checklist

A recent thread on rec.aviation.soaring talked about landing checklists: what they include, mnemonics, etc. Some people said checklists are useless because they cover "basic airmanship" and one should not need to be reminded to do these steps. Others seemed to question the value of performing them during the pattern, thinking they should all be done beforehand. Here's a variation on what I posted:

I use the mnemonic FUSTALL:

• F - Flaps
• U - Undercarriage
• S - Speeds
• T - Trim Set
• A - Airbrakes / Spoilers
• L - Lookout
• L - Land

For those that thought these points are too obvious, here's an explanation of what I think when going through some of these steps:

• Flaps - Decide, based on altitude at pattern entry, whether I think I will need flaps to help add drag and bring me down. If I'm low, don't use them. If I'm high, decide on half or full flaps. Then set them and leave them (unless I get drastically low later.)
  
• Undercarriage - Don't just move the handle, LOOK at it to see if the wheel is down or up.
  
• Speed - It's a reminder to select a pattern and landing speed based on conditions as you enter the pattern. THAT's a reminder to check the wind sock or other cues to wind direction and speed. And a reminder to look at the whole pattern to see if you need to adjust your speed to blend in with otheraircraft.
  
• Trim - Maybe I use trim less than others, but if I'm going in and out of thermals for short periods, hunting, etc., I don't trim all that often. This is a reminder to set the trim after selecting the pattern speed.
  
• Lookout - not just in the air around your aircraft, but at the landing fieldand runway so you can plan whether to land left, right, short, long...
  
• Land - yes, it's obvious, but it triggers me to think about alignment with/distance from the runway, how long my downwind will likely be, speed in base and final turns, look at my starting altitude and think about spoilers and perhaps slipping, remember wind gradient. In other words, focus my mind on all those things that make landing different from cruising and thermaling.

Maybe after thousands of hours, one doesn't need these reminders. For those of us new to the game (I'm coming up on one year since getting my PPG), theyare important reminders to build good habits.

For those who earlier questioned WHEN to do the checklist, before or during the pattern, here's my usual sequence:

• FUST - during the 45-degree leg. Speed and Trim are as I'm nearing the end of the 45, getting ready to turn downwind, 'cuz that's about the time I can finally make out the wind sock.
  
• ALL - Airbrakes on downwind. Lookout on downwind, 'cuz then I'm adjacent to the runway. This way there's plenty of time to do all the steps - no rush. It sets me up for a relaxed downwind leg.

Nothing much to say lately...

Don't give up, I'm still blogging - when I have something to say!

A combination of poor weather, illness, and general holiday busyness have kept me from soaring lately. I've only been to the field one weekend out of the last 6, and that day the weather was not worth investing in a tow fee. Today I considered going out... although there was a 50% chance of rain, I thought it might hold out until late afternoon. But the soaring forecast was the worst I've ever seen: 48! And as it turned out, the rain started where I live about noon. Maybe next weekend...

In the meantime, I've been studying. I recently acquired the FAA Aviation Instructor's Handbook and I'm about two-thirds of the way through it.

I also recently purchased a new soaring simulator named Condor. It seems fairly popular - I've seen mention of about 1,000 members on their virtual competition web site. So far I've only had one flight in it. It seemed to work OK. I need to find where the manual and help files etc. are located. I also need to figure out how to make the instruments bigger: they're too hard to read accurately. It does not seem to have the annoying problem I noticed with Sailors of the Sky, which made it hard to fly correctly. SOTS seemed to have an undesirable linkage between the ailerons and rudder on my joystick: using the ailerons always invoked the rudder as well. Condor seems more well-behaved. It does not come with any of the ships I fly, but maybe I can find them for download.

As for blogging: my blog has been receiving unsolicited, unrelated, and often inappropriate comments. In other words, some people have figured out how to post ads as blog comments. I'm not sure why, but I imagine it's a way to get their ads picked up by search engines for free. So I've had to turn on "comment moderation" on my blog. If you post a comment, it won't show up to the public until I approve it. Sorry, folks. I do appreciate the comments and advice people have contributed! But I refuse to have inappropriate ads posted, so this extra step has become necessary.

Stability and visibility

Last Saturday I just had a "sled ride" in the PW5. The air was extremely stable, due to a weakening Santa Ana condition. It was quite warm: 87 F at ground level in mid afternoon - in November! The nam Model Forecast Soundings showed a thick inversion, about 5000' of constant 79F. No thermals seemed to be working at all. One expert pilot got away and stayed up for 2 hours, but all others came straight down. But since I'm trying to build up time and experience, I went up anyway.

I've been trying to get accustomed to my PDA/GPS unit. The biggest problem is that the screen on my HP IPAQ is just not bright enough to see with my AO sunglasses on. I found that Serengeti makes aviation sunglass with gradient lenses, so the bottom part is lighter and should let me see the screen better when glancing down. So I bought a pair and tried them for the first time on this flight. It does seem a lot better, but at certain angles it's still unreadable. I've been using SeeYou Mobile in trial mode all this time, because I don't want to spend the money if it's not going to be usable. But now I think I'll go ahead. I still need to play with it and see if I can get the fonts to be bigger and more readable.

The other thing about the Serengetis is the color and its effect on the contrast of objects in the sky. They are a yellow-pink color, unlike the neutral-gray of my AO's. This seems to help enhance the contrast between clouds and blue sky, by cutting down the amount of blue that is transmitted. Driving around this week, they really do seem to help. The edges of clouds are more distinct than without sunglasses, and the details of cloud structure really stand out more. I haven't tried them head-to-head with the AO's but will try that sometime. The only thing I don't like about them is that the main part of the lens is not as dark as I would like. But it seems OK.

I've started filing the weather forecasts that I print out each soaring day, and making notes on them about the actual soaring conditions I find or that I hear about from other pilots. I plan to look back at them over a long period of time and see how well the forecasts correlate to the results.

A useful sled ride

The forecast for today was lousy, 250' lift and a 5000' inversion top. No one was staying up. But since I had not flown for a while, and not much at all yet in the PW5, I wanted to fly anyway. With very stable air, no traffic, and essentially no thermals to pursue, I decided to use the time to finally try out my PDA/GPS combo, work with the speed-to-fly indicator, and work more with the radio controls in flight.

The main problem with the PDA/GPS is that the screen is not bright enough to see with my sunglasses on. I kind of got the hang of looking at some of the numbers, such as the AGL, airspeed, etc. (After reviewing the trace on the ground, its recommended speed-to-fly seems consistent with the STF indicator on the vario. But I want to learn more about the flight computer settings for next time.) The numbers for the glide ratio required to reach an airport are WAY too small. So... I think I'm going to have to shop for gradient sunglasses.

Aside from the stuff I was doing with the instruments, it was just pleasant to fly around. In stable air, the PW5 takes only a very light touch on the stick. I found a little zero-sink. A 4200' tow turned into a 30-minute glide.

My landing was straight and very smooth... but short. I think I am using the runway as a visual cue for the landing area, and that is just wrong. I've made a note for next time to specifically look for the landing-zone cone.

I'm now up to 39.5 total hours.

Meteorology

I picked up a book called Meteorology for Glider Pilots. It's old - 1961 - but it looks really good. The author seems to have been a British professional meteorologist and a glider pilot. I'm about halfway through it. The first several chapters are general meteorology, fairly technical. The latter part is how it applies to soaring. Here's the one thing that has piqued my interest so far.

There's a section on katabatic and anabatic flow. Katabatic is downward flow of cool air through a valley... not terribly useful to the glider pilot but something to be aware of. (See a description of katabatic wind in on glaciers in the popular novel Deception Point by Dan Brown.) Anabatic flow is upward flow of heated air along a slope. If a whole slope of a hill or mountain gets heated, the whole lower layer of air along the slope can "slide" up the hill. Not vertically away from the slope as a classic thermal, but along the slope, toward the top. (Maybe there's no "dripping point" to cause the heated air to break loose from the slope.) I don't think I've seen a description of it in any of the other books I've read. They all talk about thermals, ridge lift (orographic), wave, and sometimes shear lines.

Last year when I flew at Tehachapi with three pilots, we flew up the mountains. At the time I was a bit confused as to the sources of lift we were using. The mountains there did not form a distinct linear ridge, as the classic diagrams of orographic lift show. There were thermals that we used, and sometimes we could see the sources of them (rocky areas), but I could not really imagine a line of thermals coming off of all points of a sloping ridge. Sometimes we were flying right up the "spine" of a sloping ridge, and not in a direction that I could say was within 30 degrees of being perpendicular to the wind direction. So now I'm thinking that maybe anabatic lift was happening on the slopes. And if both sides of a ridge got heated, and anabatic flow happened on both sides, the flows could meet at the top (spine), collide, and be forced straight up. That lift could be twice as strong as each slope's anabatic flow. And unless there was a strong wind to one side, it would not have a turbulent area in the lee of the ridge: the lift is going straight up off the ridge, not orographically being forced up and over at an angle. I think this model explains our mysterious ability to fly up the spine of a ridge all the way to the top of the mountain.

I would welcome other pilots (and meteorologists') comments and experiences!