It's been a while since I've posted one of these, simply because it's been
a while since I've had a flight that was interesting enough to post.
Schedules and weather made this only my second cross-country flight of the
year, and the first one was a rather short and sad affair.
Schedules and weather finally came together yesterday. With the
forecasters showing 6kt thermals and 6,000ft cloud bases at 2PM, it looked
to be a day worthy of a cross country attempt.
The tow pilot had some trouble starting the tow plane, but a jump start
took care of that and we assembled my friend's 1-26 (which he generously
lets me fly) and then sat down to wait. When we finished assembling, the
sky was a beautiful clear blue which, while nice to look at, was a bad
sign for staying aloft with no motor.
As I waited, some clouds started to form south of the air****t and things
started to look better. They got closer but stayed away from the air****t.
I finally decided to launch toward the nearest nice-looking clouds on the
Blue Ridge, which p***** to the east of the air****t and is about 4nm away
at the point where the clouds were, and then ride them south into the
denser clouds I could see beyond them. I was a little uncertain about this
idea for a while, because that's just distant enough to make it a tough to
return to the air****t in the event that they weren't working, but I
eventually figured it was now or never, and if they didn't work and I
couldn't get back, I could always land out somewhere.
(Anyone who wants to follow along with the flying can see my trace here:
http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?flightId=-890407620
)
We staged at about 1:30 and I told the tow pilot to take me straight
toward those clouds. He did, and I got under the first one right at
3,700ft (air****t altitude is 700ft), and I released and started turning.
It wasn't a great thermal, but I averaged probably a 1.5kt climb. I knew
better than to abandon a working thermal in the hopes of finding a better
one, especially before I'd got a feel for the day, so I stuck with it and
with a little patience found myself approaching cloudbase at 4,500ft. From
there I had plenty of altitude and struck out for the next cloud, which
worked even better.
I continued hopping from cloud to cloud for a while, and noticed some odd
things about the day. The first thing, though not so much odd as just
plain annoying, was that most of the clouds out there didn't actually cap
thermals. Every time I hit cloudbase and moved on, I had to sample two or
three more clouds before I could find another thermal. The second thing
was that the clouds varied greatly in their altitude. More than once I
found myself flying above lower clouds after coming out from under higher
clouds, which was an interesting and unusual experience. And the third
thing (which will have consequences later on) was that the cloudbase
didn't rise with the terrain the way it almost always does.
Despite these difficulties I did pretty well. I stayed high, generally
between 4,500ft and 5,300ft and had plenty of margin for getting past the
"non-functional" clouds I kept encountering. There was a tense time about
10 miles out as I crossed over a section of the mountains that sticks far
out into the valley. This put me flying over dense, rugged forest for
several miles in every direction, but I had more than enough altitude to
glide to the edge from the midpoint, so it was really just a mental
discomfort, not any sort of safety problem. And in any case, I had no
trouble staying aloft. Shortly after this I even found a section of clouds
with thermals so closely packed together that I managed to just fly
straight for several miles with no altitude loss.
As I worked farther south, the mountains got higher and, as I mentioned,
the clouds didn't. Eventually I found myself getting sandwiched. The
distance between the mountains and the clouds decreased to what seemed to
be well under 1000ft which started causing problems trying to sample the
two or three clouds I needed to find a good thermal. I got pretty low on
the mountains and was faced with a dilemma: to the west lay familiar
terrain but crappy clouds. To the east lay unfamiliar (although
good-looking, from a great distance) terrain with much nicer clouds. I
finally went with the safe choice and escaped west. (You can see this on
the flight track as a wide left-hand circle near the bottom of the map, as
I turned east to try for the clouds and then chickened out.)
And of course after this the clouds weren't very good. I struggled on, but
could never get into a good thermal. As I headed into the valley toward
safe landing spots, I picked up one more, at a little over 1000ft above
the fields. I struggled in it, trying to climb, but it only barely
sustained me. I spent a long time in this thermal, over 15 minutes (well,
that is a long time to spend barely floating above fields and houses, not
knowing if you'll be able to climb out!) before it finally gave out. The
long time spent in this thermal had given me a great deal of time to check
out the area, examine potential landing spots, and figure out the best
one. I finally plunked down onto a long private driveway. "Plunked"
because I'm not used to landing on 8-foot-wide driveways and so misjudged
my flare height. But nothing got bent, it was just a little embarrassing.
It was a fairly densely populated area, and I had just gotten out of the
cockpit when the first pickup truck rolled up, the driver asking if I was
OK. This repeated several times as various other neighbors stopped by,
first to check on my well-being, and then to ask questions.
My friend who owns the glider had been following me down the road, and by
a stroke of luck he had parked for a rest not two miles from where I
landed. I gave him a call, fed him my coordinates, and he showed up almost
instantaneously. We took the glider apart and drove it back to the
air****t.
It was an interesting and challenging flight, looking back. I definitely
made the right choice to launch when I did and tow to where I did. The
other pilots who stayed around the air****t said that it got good there as
well, but it happened a bit later and I'm not sure that it would have
connected with other areas of good lift to allow me to make any distance.
And my choice of landing spot turned out to be perfect, and I'm pleased
with that. The big decision I keep revisiting is my choice to go west
instead of east once I got sandwiched. Given how uncomfortable I was with
the idea of continuing east, going west was probably the only reasonable
option. But in looking at the trace today, I'm confident I could have made
it in the other direction without incident even if the thermals hadn't
worked out for me over there. Of course I'm not sorry for making the
choice that seemed safer at the time even if it led directly to ending my
flight sooner than I wanted. But it's interesting to consider for next
time.
--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon
|
