An OK flight on a hot day

I took a flight in the PW5 on Saturday. With the monsoon weather, I thought there might be some CU to mark the lift, but all the CU were up higher and on the other side of the mountains marking orographic lift. Down in the valley, it was too dry for the thermals to generate clouds. I think it was about 100F when I took off. I let off in lift at 4200' MSL and worked up as high as 5900'. There was lift, but it was ragged and hard to center, and turbulent. (It wasn't just me, others on the radio were mentioning it as well.)

It made it hard to control my speed well. I want to double-check the recommended speeds for thermaling in both the PW5 and the Grob 103 to make sure I'm not flying too slow... sometimes it's hard to tell whether I'm hitting wind effects in rough thermals, or feeling stall buffet and slightly falling out of my turns. I want to practice some turns in still air next time and see how they feel.

I passed just under a hawk. He was heading the opposite way, so we were moving very quickly relative to each other. He (she?) was white underneath with black or brown spots, not a Red-Tailed Hawk.

I got high enough to fly over to the "S" ridge, which is I guess 6 or 7 miles from the airport. But then there was nothing working on the ridge, so I came back and joined a thermal underneath A. in one of our Blaniks. Then I flew around for a while and did not find any significant lift, though it was probably still working. It was pretty warm up there... I did not get high enough for it to really cool down. So when the lift petered out I came down, hot and a little tired after an hour and 20 minutes of bumps.

My IPAQ shut off again during this flight, and this time it was strapped to my leg, which negates my vibration theory. I guess it must be heat getting to it. Turning it on did not resync it with the GPS in the Volkslogger. I had to stop and start SeeYou, and then it hooked up right away. But I imagine it broke my flight into two files. This is not good - I don't know what else I can do to keep the unit cool.

I worked on improving my approach planning, paying more attention to the wind direction and its effects on each leg of the pattern. It was important today because the wind aloft was from quite a different direction than the AWOS was reporting. I also paid more attention to giving radio calls during each phase of the approach, something that we are pretty lax about at our field. (It seems that's the part that I forget if things get busy during the approach.) That was also important today, because there was another glider about 30 seconds behind me in the pattern. I knew he was an expert - we landed close together a couple weeks ago, too - but I wanted him to be clear on where I was.

All in all, a good flight - but I had to work for it.

Soaring with TVs

No, not televisions... turkey vultures. Although I've seen them from a distance, I've never had the opportunity to fly with them until today. (Hawks and seagulls, but not TVs.)

Today I flew the PW5... it was not a really strong day but had potential. Another pilot told me roughly where he had found a decent thermal, so I headed that way. I was in weak lift and saw a dust devil some distance away but didn't want to go that far. Then I spotted two vultures just a short distance from me, maybe a quarter mile, right at about my altitude. At that point I was at about 4000' MSL.

I headed toward the closest TV and got into lift. I turned in a direction that would hopefully keep us close but circling the same way... birds aren't bound by the same rules as gliders! He wasn't exactly circling, so we kind of moved about each other. Sometimes he would half-fold his wings and drop down, other times he would outclimb me. After about 3 or 4 "turns", he kind of cut across about 50 feet or less from the nose of my glider. He looked back, seemed startled, and then dove away and was gone. I never saw him or the other vulture again. But I worked that thermal up to 6600' MSL, and then took off across the valley. So thanks, Mr. Turkey Vulture.

I flew over to the Ramona Bowl, then skirted Diamond Valley Lake, most of the way over to Winchester. I never found any more lift, just some moderate sink. I ended up with a 56-minute flight. And no one on the radio reported getting any higher than I did - the other pilot got to 6300'. So I guess I did OK for a marginal day.

My PDA cut out just a few minutes into the flight. It turned itself off. After I turned it back on, it never got any GPS data from the Volkslogger - I think SeeYou reverts to wrong serial port settings. That won't do! It did this on my last flight, too. I think it's probably caused by vibration, since I'm now mounting the PDA on an arem connected to the instrument panel. It could be heat, but if it was heat I would have expected it to fail earlier, before I got up to a cooler altitude. So next time I'm going to try strapping it to my leg again. I think I can see the screen better that way anyway - it's closer to me than when it's on the arm.

A little of the Right Stuff

This may seem to be off topic, but bear with me. My blog is about becoming a pilot, and this story is about how being a pilot has changed me.

I'm in Florida on business, and today I went to the Kennedy Space Center. It turned out to be a very powerful and surprisingly emotional experience, and part of that is because I now feel some kinship with the astronauts. That may come across as arrogant or lofty - I don't mean it that way. Being a glider pilot is in no way as important or as daring or as tough as being an astronaut. But... they're pilots, we're pilots, and I think I feel maybe 1% or 5% of what they feel. That's not much, but I think it's dramatically different from how I felt before taking the stick and learning to fly. Let me explain.

• First off, I grew up in the 60's with a deep interest in the space program. I knew as a non-athletic kid with thick glasses, there was no way I was going to be an astronaut, but science was in my blood and I followed the Apollo program closely. I built the models, I read the NASA newsletters, I watched the moon landing in 1969. One of the command module pilots has the same last name as me (it's a pretty unusual name), and so I always wondered if he was related, and was secretly proud of my possible slight connection to the space program. So to visit the place where it all happened was already a thrill.
  




• Every time I looked in a capsule or cockpit exhibit, I found myself looking with pilot's eyes for the familiar controls, looking at the visibility through the windows, the tiny space available, and imagining how it would be to fly it. The Mercury capsule has about as much space as our PW5. Being in the Gemini capsule with one other pilot would be about the same as being in our Blanik, although they're side-by-side instead of tandem.
  




• The exhibits and the films and simulators at KSC are fabulous, really well done. They're powerful, patriotic, inspiring, and really show the dedication of the people on the ground as well as those in the capsules and shuttles. To walk around and under the giant Saturn V and the others is truly amazing.
  




• Each of those craft had a pilot, and at some point the pilot flew the beast for the very first time. I think the experience of my first solo flight, and especially my first flight in a single-seat glider (where no instructional flight was possible), gave me a sense of the bold steps the astronauts took. Those experiences made the impact of the space flights so much more real. One of the astronauts described the feeling of being strapped in, ready to go, waiting for the launch to occur, and thinking that he had done all the preparation he could do... now he just needed to fly it and do his best. Exactly!
  




• There's an IMAX 3D film called Magnificent Desolation about being on the moon. Some of it's up close, it's in your face, it's big and it's extremely realistic. We've all seen the video of the lunar module and the astronauts... they're all fairly close shots. But this film has some shots (no doubt artificial) showing the tiny LM as nearly a speck alongside a big lunar mountain... very small and very far from home. I thought of a photo I have of a glider climbing the face of a big mountain in the Sierras. The glider is so small against the mountain you have to look to see it. It's not me flying in that picture, but I've done some similar flights, not quite so dramatic. But still... the sense of isolation, of being tiny surrounded by something huge, is very powerful.






• There's a scene in MD where a moonwalking astronaut leaves a photo of his family, perhaps to be found by someone else someday. His kids were 5 and 7! Imagine the risk he was taking and the sacrifice he was making! I can't really relate to that... I do fairly low-risk recreational soaring. But there is always that element of having to rely on myself, my preparation, and the training I have received, to get myself home. Even a 30-mile cross-country flight is a long way from home the first time.
  




• There's a feature called Astronaut Encounter wherein an astronaut gives a speech in a theater, with a slide-show backdrop, and then greets visitors and takes pictures with them. Imagine the serendipity: today's astronaut was the command module pilot who might be related to me! You can bet I was near the front of that audience. Later I introduced myself and he was surprised, and told me there's another fellow with the same name who runs a major NASA research facility. So maybe I'll do a little more research into the possible family link. Amazing - and one more event that added to the emotional impact of the day.

OK, so I'm rambling a bit, and you might think I'm stretching the association between a pilot and and astronaut. But I felt it. One in a thousand is a pilot, one in 10,000 is a glider pilot, one in a hundred thousand is a test pilot, one in a million is an astronaut. What pilot would not aspire to flying to the moon? Learning to fly is about finding out if you yourself have a little of the Right Stuff - these guys have tons of it. Knowing what little I know made me feel so much more in awe of their accomplishments, and I would not have felt that if I had never taken an aircraft up by myself as a pilot.

As always, I invite readers to share their comments and experiences.

Grob 103 Rear Seat

Today I helped T and an instructor work on the instruments in the Grob 103. It needed a test flight to see if they worked correctly, so the CFI and I took it up together. That was a good opportunity to get a signoff to fly the Grob from the rear seat. You may wonder why that needs a signoff... well, there are a number of differences between flying front and rear seat (in any glider):

• First of all, the forward view is different, sometimes rather restricted. In this case, it's not too bad. The front passenger's head blocks the view directly forward, which makes it hard to see the towplane. CFI suggested I tow just a little to one side of center, which helps quite a bit. Actually, with the big canopy, the view is not as restricted as from the rear seat of the Blanik L13. And in the Blanik, you get quite a lot of reflections on the inside of the canopy. In the Grob, that did not seem to be nearly as noticeable. The view down and forward was just good - no problem for landing.
• The view down and behind is blocked by the wing. But not a problem. My view of the runway during the downwind and turn to base were fine.
• The posture is quite reclined, depending on how you set up the cushions. CFI thinks it's uncomfortable. I thought it was fine.

Anyway, it's different enough that it's worth having an instructional flight. Mine went fine. So now if I want to take a passenger in the Grob, they can sit in front and get the best view.

I mentioned the instruments... the rear variometer turned out to be bad, or hooked up wrong, or something. Its indication was useless. So for most of the flight I was going by feel or asking CFI what his vario said. Quite a pain, and I would not fly a passenger with it bad. Hopefully we'll get it fixed or replaced soon. And that was the purpose of that flight, right?

The other thing was that the airspeed indicators were off a bit. The front reads about 5kt less than the back. CFI seemed to think I was flying too slow (i.e. thought his was correct) so I went by his. But on landing that meant mine indicate 60kt instead of the target 55kt, and the results were consistent with 60kt: longer float and rollout. We actually stopped past the end of the box a bit. So I conclude that the rear ASI is correct, and the front under-reports.

It was about 10:30 am, and there was a little bit of weak, scattered lift which we took turns working. I realized that I have not been a passenger in a glider for about 4 years. Ever since I started taking lessons, I've done all the flying. It was strange just doing nothing. And at times slightly disorienting, without the tactile and kinesthetic feedback of flying the plane, especially when I was looking inside the cockpit (reading instruments for our testing). A good reminder of what passengers feel! We ended up with just a 27-minute flight.

Later in the day I flew the PW-5, taking off at 15:12. Although there had been pretty good lift until then, marked by strong dust devils, by the time I got up the wind was blowing out the lift and no dust devils were visible anymore. I found some zero sink and scraped out a 25-minute flight. On the plus side, we were having a contest, which included a spot landing event. On the rollout after landing, you have to see how close you can come to a cone without going past. I stopped 10.5 inches from the cone. As far as I know, that was second place... the mark to beat was 8 inches. I'll have to wait to find out the results.

Grob 103 checkout - again

Our club's Grob 103 Twin Astir was out of service for several months for some repairs. Because it was for such a long time, our instructors decided everyone who wants to fly it should get checked out and signed off again, a decision with which I agree. Due to my availabilty and the instructors', it's taken me a couple of months to arrange it. Yesterday was the day.

Flight 1 was to about 3000' AGL. Very good wings-level takeoff. The Grob, especially ours, is pretty heavy on the controls, especially ailerons. So it takes a *lot* of stick pressure if you get wing wobble at low speed, before you get much control authority. The tow was weird... low for a long time. I don't know if the towplane was low on power or if the pilot just chose a very flat flight path. CFI said all his tows were that way. Much lower than I've experienced there, even in the heavy 103.

I had forgotten how great the visibility is from the front seat of the G103. The canopy is huge, and comes down pretty far on the sides. And being new, it's perfectly clear and clean with a blue tint. What a view!

We found a little zero sink, but not much. The flight ended up at 20 minutes. Good approach and landing, but with one mistake. I used my airbrakes on base leg, and part of final approach. I judged that we were undershooting a little, so I closed them all the way. We were still undershooting a bit (not dangerously) but I figured we were just getting more headwind or some sink. Then CFI said to close my brakes, and I said they were. But when I looked out, they were up about an inch. I had closed them until I felt a bump, which I assumed was the locking detent... but apparently what I was feeling was some bump before they were closed. And they are so effective, an inch is very noticeable! Once I pushed harder and closed them (still not locked closed), we proceeded normally. I even paid better attention to my aiming point and landed nicely within the box.

Because of that issue, CFI wanted to see one more flight, even though my pattern and touchdown were great and my speed control was right on. So we went up for a pattern tow, or so I thought. Remember that low tow flightpath? By the time we got to where I would normally release from a pattern tow, we were only at about 700' AGL, which would have made for an abbreviated pattern. So I hung on. By the time we got to the initial point area again, we were at about 1300' AGL, so I had to waste some altitude before entering the pattern. This pattern and approach and rollout were just fine. CFI liked my approach planning very much.

So now I'm signed off to fly the Grob, which is a very nice ship for passengers. But... one of the instructors will be taking it to a cross-country workshop for a week, and then we're talking about placing it at Tehachapi for most of the summer. That'll be great for some XC mentoring - maybe I'll get my Silver there soon - but not so great for passengers.