Four busy flights

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

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?

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

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

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.