Weekend report June 7 - 8

One of the advantages of having over fifteen hours of daylight is that you don't really have to hurry to squeeze in a good flight.  If you do use the available time efficiently, however, you can accomplish some amazing things.

On Saturday, Evan was the first to take off, at 1130. Cloudbases eventually reached 6500 feet, but the thermals became strangely difficult to work below 4500.  With a limited height band, Evan stopped often, averaging less than 10 km per glide. But if you do that for seven hours, you wind up with a remarkable 508 km! He flew to a spot just south of Alton Bay, then to Mount Equinox and Mount Mansfield before coming home.

In all, we had six cross-country flights (T8, JD, 2W, EA, JS, US), for a total of 28.5 hours and almost 1500 km. This had to be a club record. On the way by Springfield, Greg spotted Dennis (DC), who was enjoying a nice three hour flight in the Ventus.

After towing the XC fleet, our towpilot Andy retreated to his hangar to work on the Champ. Henry, Moshe and Dakai coaxed him out to do three more tows of the Blanik and 2-33.

The only glider that stayed in the air later than T8 was the Blanik, with Moshe and Annie, who enjoyed a 1.6 hour flight.  Annie was the only person smart enough to send her photos to the editor.

Later, Evan broke into PMSC News to add this photo taken while tanking up at the Hungries (near Morrisville) for the ride home.  View of the sky is roughly down the course line to Post Mills, a little over 40 miles away.

If we set a cross-country record on Saturday, we broke it on Sunday!

At first the lift was weak, and after Tim (PM) fell down at noon, nobody was in a hurry to go next. Finally, at 1230, Dan (EA) took off and reported that the day had finally started.  Suddenly there was a rush, and five more took to the air (T8, JD, PM, RU, S1), and they were joined later by JS.  The seven of them flew 1845 km. Paul and Moshe flew up to Catamount, and Skip made it to Black Mountain and back, despite a late start.

The other four headed north together, initially:

Identification of the 4 tracklogs above are left as an exercise for the reader.

While all this was going on, Karl got his Blanik checkout, fixed a golf cart, and then flew the Blanik for an hour. Bill Swartz, who will have his CFI any day now, flew with Willy and Dakai and helped them get their logbooks up to date. Rich, who never seems to get rusty, showed up and gave Rick a ride in the Blanik for about an hour.  Lane, who never seems to fly, put his 1-26 together and took it apart again. Henry, who never downloads the flights recorded on his iPhone, reinstalled the variometers in 3J and took it for a test flight. Dennis (DC), who is welcome to come back to Post Mills any time, flew with NESA again. Doug, who finally got to fly PM last weekend, was trapped in the towplane all day and made 16 tows.