Review of 2011

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

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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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

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

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

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!