First flight of the season on a spectacular day! Everyone was predicting it wouldn't be very good and on paper it wasn't. Low clouds under the height of the surrounding mountains and a northerly wind. I was excited to try my new camera mounts I made during the off season and the new HD video cameras I purchased for me flights. While not perfect, I am quite pleased with the initial results. Takeoff was great.
I ended up declaring a task from Morgan up to Logan and back which would be more than enough to get that part of a diamond badge taken care of. The entire flight was just one amazing sight after another.br>
Landing was terrible with the biggest bounce I have made yet ever in a glider. I just wasn't paying attention as much as I should have. Oh well. Didn't bend anything and no one was around to share it with. ;)
The weather forecast was looking promising for the day and I had so much fun last Saturday that I had to go out again. I took the day off and headed up to Morgan. The weather was expected to turn for the worse later this week so this would be my last flight up in Morgan. The glider would then spend the summer in Cedar Valley.
I brought the video cameras again and this time did some tweaks on the tail cam to make it even more stable. Post flight evaluation of the footage showed that the changes worked great with no camera shake in the stiff wind anymore. I set my declared task again from Morgan to Logan and return but hoped to fly much further.
I launched later than desired at about 1:20 and the lift was already going. I headed north and got to the south end of Logan valley. There were no more clouds heading up north for 40 miles (I checked my igc file to verify this distance). I was a little more than a mile above the ground so figured I could squeak out a glide over to the clouds. It would take me directly over Logan airport which was great. Logan valley was full of wet fields and by the time I got to the clouds I was less than 1000 ft above the ground. After some scratching I was able to find a low saving thermal and go up to 13,000 and keep heading north.
The clouds were streeting to the north and I was able to make it to Pocatello, ID and 128 miles away from Morgan. It was now 4:15 and time to see if I could make it home. The clouds worked great until I got back to north of Preston ID and I had to use the Logan ridge to fly the final 75 miles home. It was close but the ridge was working just well enough to get me home. Very fun flight! I will hopefully be able to do some editing on the video within the next week and post it up. Next flight will be out of Cedar Valley hopefully the week of May 1st.
This was my first time flying out of the Logan airport. I was VERY impressed with that location for soaring. The airport property is very large (at least compared to Morgan or Cedar Valley) and there was a lot of ramp space available for quite a few gliders to set up without getting in the way of the other operations going on there.
Seven or eight pilots arranged to meet at Logan to fly. It was a lot of fun hanging out with so many other glider pilots and helping each other get our ships put together and ready to launch. The tow was to the east ridge and it was working great. I ran the Logan valley east ridges a few times and shot some great video (see below). The only real bummer of the flight was that I flew right right behind my friend Tim in his new Ventus 2A on the ridge for 30 miles and my video cameras had already filled up their memories. It would have been spectacular footage! Logan is a great place to soar if you get the weather right. Very fun day.
May 16, 2009 - Cedar Valley, Utah in my ASW-20B, One 3,100 ft tow, 1.7 hour flight.
I actually flew 3 times today. I suck. It was a blue day with no clouds in the sky. It was pretty warm though so I figured that there would at least be some lift. The first tow I released over just west of the airport 1,700 ft above the ground in a decent thermal but quickly found that the thermals were way too narrow to circle in. You would circle on quarter of the turn in lift and the rest of the turn in sink. After 30 minutes I gave up and decided to head back to the airport to relaunch. Below is a video of coming in to land.
My next flight I then towed up high over to the mountains to the west of the airport and found plenty of lift. The winds even up high were light if any. I headed up north following the mountains and went all the way to the Great Salt Lake. On the way back south I had to choose between flying on the east or west side of the mountains and because of Class B airspace and only 1 very busy airport to land at if I landed out on the east side I chose to fly on the west side of the mountains even though the lift was better on the east. After struggling in 50 feet per minute thermals and lift on the west side for an hour I finally had to admit defeat and land out at Tooele airport. Arrrgh! At least I didn't bend anything.
I called the tow pilot Jeff back at Cedar Valley and luckily he was still legal to fly (sober) and he came and towed me back to Cedar Valley. I decided to try looping for the first time in my 20 before landing and ended up having quite the ride. Here is what I wrote about that experience in a post to another site:
I finally tried looping my 20 last Saturday. Didn't go so well. I have a few hours of aerobatics instruction from down at Turf and I read the manual so I thought what the heck.
It says to enter in around 95 knots. I pulled my straps tight (glad I did 5 seconds later) and at 4,500 agl dove for speed. At 95 knots I pulled back for an indicated 3.5 g's. I was planning on loosening some of the back pressure when I came up over the top but it felt like I was only going straight up and I kept the back pressure to try to make it over the top (got behind the airplane at this point). My guess is that I was performing an accelerated stall and she basically fell out of the top inverted. Wow! I was quickly able to bring her back upright without gaining more than 100 knots so at least I didn't over speed her. Quite the ride though!
Maybe I'll blame it on hypoxia... :) but I decided right after to try it again because I thought that maybe I didn't pull hard enough or enter in fast enough. Yes, stupid reasoning. If it didn't work even close the first time then why think it would work better the second time? Duh! I entered in this time right around 100 knots and gave it the college pull back and it again was no way near going over the top like it should. I had a spectacular fall out and again recovered without coming close to over speeding.
This is when what was left of all reasoning told me that with 2 failures my third attempt would yield the same results and I headed back to the airport figuring I was lucky to still have a working glider. Stupid is as stupid does.
Long story short, after thinking back to my training in the ASK 21 and talking to a few friends who quite regularly loop their gliders, the maneuver should be very smooth and actually pretty gentle. I was pulling waaaay too hard back and was loosing all my energy before even getting up over the top. From what I now understand you should pull maybe 2.5 g's and then relax as you are going over the top and then start pulling more g's on the way back down to not over speed. I was pulling too many g's at first and lost all my energy to even make it to inverted flight, hence, I fell out near the top.
I hope that by sharing my experience anyone else thinking of looping their 20 will NOT think that they just have to pull back for big g's and it will go smoothly over the top like it does in the gliding simulators. You will feel the tail buffeting in an accelerated stall and you will not make it even close to over the top. I am going to give it a try again next flight and expect much smoother results.
Today's forecast called for pretty decent soaring conditions. Very little if any winds and pretty good lift. It was good. I got to the airport really late - 2:30 because I flew to Elko, NV in the morning in the Diamond Star with a friend. I had to also be done early because my son was getting baptised at 7:30 in the evening. My wife would not accept being late!
I decided to try for the 200km fai state record triangle task for this flight. It is a pretty short task that if I break the record would be under an hour and a half and would keep me pretty close to the home airport. Two other friends launched in their gliders before me so I didn't take off until 3:30. Yikes! Already cutting it close. But the day was too pretty and I decided to still try the task. The conditions were right but I just didn't fly fast enough. I needed to fly the course faster than 133kph and flew it at 104kph. I just needed to fly in between the thermals faster and on my second turn point at Mount Nebo I got to the mountain below ridge line and the lift was not working. In fact, it was 1,200+ feet per minute sink. I lost a bunch of time climbing back up to make it home. At least I didn't land out this time! ;) This was a VERY fun course to run and what is nice is that if I don't have an entire afternoon to dedicate to soaring a long cross country flight I can fly these shorter tasks trying for state records and still have a blast. Very fun day. My son's baptism was really cool that night. Great day.
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May 28, 2009 - Cedar Valley, Utah in my ASW-20B, One 2,700 ft tow, 2.5 hour flight.