Ballooning records are goofy

 A new altitude record for standing on top of a balloon.

This is probably why we don't hear about flagpole sitting any more.

Wave Camp 2021

Don the Ironman Towpilot writes:

Peter emailed and asked what wave week was like. Here is a short summary.

From the first Saturday through the next Saturday, it was all high-pressure warm stable air. Wind was calm on the ground, temperatures in the 70s made for short pants and T-shirt weather, the only flights were soaring or minor ridge lift on the Carters and Moriah.

Karl drove up with his RV and held a campfire the first several nights with supper and stories. About 10 or more pilots assembled for the evenings events.

After Saturday’s cold front blew through,the wind picked up to about 30 on the summit, and was blowing a steady 10 to 15 with higher gusts on the ground. Wind was mostly down the runway, but still had its squirrelly moments. One take off, I started the tow with a head wind, a third of the way on the roll had a bunch of left aileron in correcting for air spilling off of Pine Mountain, a couple hundred feet later the wind sock was standing out straight with a cross wind from the right, and by the time I was off the ground and climbing it was a straight on head wind again.

 Cloud cover on Sunday kept anyone from launching until about 1 PM. Six guys launched and were in week wave up to about 14 K. They were finding it mostly between the horn and Carter Dome. I heard once that Dan found some wave on the east end of the golf course.

All said we probably had about 40 tows for the whole week. I have not looked up the exact number.

Gorham/Mount Washington is a great place to fly even if you’re not looking for wave. It was really enjoyable for me in the tow plane to be able to learn the area without having to fly through the turbulence machine each time. I did get some tighten my seat belt moments (after it was already tightened) on Sunday.

My impression is most of the pilots participating were from GBSC and FSA.

A big thanks to Sonny and David for making two each 4 hour round trips to bring trailers to Gorham, to Dan for fueling the tow plane and trailer without being asked, to Tim and Dennis for coordinating logistics and planning, to Andy for towing on the first Saturday and helping deliver myself on the last Sunday.  It takes a lot of effort from PMSC and the other cubs to make this happen.

Sometimes you get away with it

Source

Last few hours of Spring

 

Feel free to go in any direction

Sometimes we have to be reminded how lucky we are to be able to romp around without any significant airspace restrictions.

Here's a graphic showing a whole season of flying on New Zealand's North Island.  The two gliding centers, Taupo and Matamata, are easily identifiable.

Source

Weekend report May 7 - 9

It's not easy being a newsletter editor when you're out of town on a spectacular soaring day and nobody writes their story.  All of the following is scraped from the OLC, a few emails, and the forum.

On Friday, technically a Slacker Day, there were eight flights posted, for a total of 2979 kilometers.  Everybody ran up to Mount Washington (probably together), and either came home directly (NT, DC, 2C) or via an excursion over to the Green Mountains JR, T8, AG).  Tim (BU) did the run twice, for 516 kilometers.  David (505) racked up 69 kilometers in the local area in the 1-26.

That was a lot of good flying, and congratulations to everyone.

But if you think that was special, consider this:  Tim (BU), Evan (T8), and Greg (JR) flew all the way across the Champlain valley into New York on Sunday.  This has never been done before.

The next day Evan wrote:

Yesterday, Tim, Greg and I kicked over the left side of the Post Mills sandbox, crossed the Lake Champlain valley and flew to the highest point in New York State.

One of the reasons for trying this on Sunday was that the weather forecast seemed to indicate less likelihood of overdevelopment on the Adirondacks.  Another is that the wind direction (SW) would keep us out of the wind shadow of the big part of Lake Champlain.
 
The second bit worked as designed. The first not so much. It OD’d on us hard, but we managed to find the climbs we needed to make it back. Patience and teamwork were required. Glider performance helps too!
 
Last night I emailed Adirondack Soaring to tell them we’d planted our flag on Mount Marcy and claimed it for the republic of Post Mills.
 
I added “next time we’ll try to bring better weather.”

I don't know what's more amazing, the flight or the fact that Evan wrote about it.

Weekend report April 24 - 25

Saturday was a spectacular soaring day, and we might have accomplished more if the wind had not been a factor.  In deference to the blustery conditions and overall conservatism of a bunch of rusty pilots, we weren't as eager as usual to fly at first.

The air was unstable, which gave us good thermals initially and overdevelopment in the late afternoon.  The rainshowers were widely scattered and fairly easy to avoid.  Some of them were snowshowers. 

Greg (JR), and Tim (BU) were first to launch, and they promptly disappeared for the rest of the day.  They flew together up to Mount Washington, then Colebrook and Newport, and over to the Green Mountains, where Tim got a bit low.  Greg took the opportunity to dash up to Jay Peak and back.  They made it home in good shape with long final glides from the northwest.

Here's a picture Tim took of Greg over the Presidential Range.

And this was Greg's view at the time.

Here is Newport and Lake Memphremagog:

Back at Post Mills, Peter K (3BA), Dennis (DC), Henry (67), Darrek (67) and Matt (3BA) dodged rainshowers in the local area and enjoyed some good climbs to 9000 feet.

And, for the first time ever, Sonny (LT) flew his airplane and his glider on the same day.  He took a quick morning trip to Gorham in the L-16, then worked all day helping other people fly (as usual), and finally had a nice flight in the ASW-19 after the sun came back out in the late afternoon.

We also received this report from Greg H (YZ), who flew at Springfield:

I too had a special flight on Saturday in my Std Cirrus. Released at 2,800ft at 12:15 pm, climbed to 9,500 within 25 minutes. Headed upstream and left cloudbase at 10,200 and immediately flew into wave (5 miles west of KVSF) at 1 pm. Pretty constant at 300 to 500 ft/min lift. I wiggled and waggled @ 41 mph to find the edges and best lift but never could hit it perfectly. Left wave at 13,200 feet still producing 350 ft/min due to some concern I had about being so high for too long a time (I was above 12,500 ft for just 3 minutes at the time), but I heard a Citation was in the area and got chicken. At least 1000 feet above the highest Cu.
 
Wish I had my O2 tank filled and bought a mask.

We didn't fly on Sunday, but Saturday was enough to call it a successful weekend.

Oh, and the Perry contest ended.  Be sure to congratulate Evan, who was the winner in the 15m/Std class!

Wave day at Springfield

Tuesday was blustery and cold, but it was the day NESA chose to check out a new towpilot.  That's all the excuse Tim (BU) needed.

After struggling in the rotor for a good while, he connected with the Okemo wave for a nice climb to 9800 feet.

PMSC at the races

 Keith (AG) and Evan (T8) are participating in the Region 5N competition in South Carolina this week.

Yesterday was the second day of the contest, and Evan blew everybody away with a decisive win (more than 100 points margin over 2nd place).  This puts him in first place overall.

The contest runs through April 24.

Weekend report April 17 - 18

The best news from the weekend is that we had a ground school session inside the clubhouse with five fully vaccinated attendees!  It has been a long time since something so normal has seemed normal.

Both days were cold.  Saturday was a bust due to drizzly conditions, and Sunday got off to a slow start with the overcast, wind, and ground school session.  Finally, Greg and Rick went up in the Blanik for a review of spins, and Henry and Rick flew the 2-33 which really needs some sealing work.

Tim stopped towing and took off in BU at 4pm, for a very interesting 2.5 hour flight.  At 6pm he reported that he was five miles out and would be landing shortly.  The cloudstreet that brought him back to Post Mills kept on going for 20 more miles.  He turned around somewhere around Canaan, New Hampshire and rode the street all the way back home.

Three members with perfectly good gliders (Sonny, Don, Dennis) stayed on the ground and worked as ground crew.  This was much appreciated, but they missed some good flying at the end of the day.

Std. Cirrus flies

 Congratulations to Greg Hunter on flying his new Standard Cirrus yesterday at Springfield!

Assembly Day

 It is rare for us to go flying on Assembly Day.  It is even rarer for us to assemble and fly at Post Mills before April 15.  This year we did both, thanks to hard working members, an accommodating insurance agent, and climate change.

On Saturday, Darrek, Dennis, Don, Eric, Greg, Henry, John, Kari, Keith, Moshe, Rick, Sonny, and Tim all showed up early, and by midday, three club gliders were assembled and two of them flew!

The first flight of the year was accomplished by Tim towing Moshe solo in the 2-33.  One more just like that one, and Moshe became our first current instructor.  Here's a picture of him keeping his wings level on our sloped runway.

He wound up flying with Dennis, Sonny, Eric, and Henry.  Thanks, Moshe!

While this was going on, the overcast broke apart, and it turned into a decent soaring day.  Tim assembled BU and took off.

Greg stood next to his new glider and listened patiently while Rick told him things he already knew about it.  Then he had his first flight in the glider that will be known shortly as "JR."

Meanwhile, Darrek improved our tiedowns, Don improved the towplane tailwheel, and Eric organized the clubhouse.

Eric and Dennis bought the beer this time.

We are off to a good start!

Juliet Romeo

 Congratulations to Greg Hanlon on the acquisition and first flight of Juliet Romeo, a beautiful JS1B, seen here over Post Mills on Saturday.

A sure sign of Spring

 

COVID update IV

 This is the first COVID update of the 2021 season.

Our new 2021 operational rules were distributed to the membership today.

Vaccination helps, but we're not out of the woods yet.  Wash your hands, wear a mask, stay socially distanced, and watch this space for further updates.

Weekend report April 3 - 4

 Moshe (RU) disentombed his glider on Saturday and took his first flight of the year on Sunday.  Here's his report:

The forecast changed completely, but the winds were still light when I took off at noon.  It turns out I should have taken off even earlier (I was ready at least 30 minutes earlier). 

I concentrated on trying to reach the potential wave, as there were wavy looking clouds here and there.  To my surprise, winds aloft (within the thermal layer) were weaker than forecast, 8-11 knots according to Tophat.  Most good thermals got strongest (5 knots) above 5000 MSL but died before 6000, probably hitting the forecast inversion.  Some may have been wave-enhanced.

In one area I managed to climb to 7000 in wider lift patches that may have been wave, but I couldn't seem to stay in that lift, nor get any higher.  By then the wind reported on the ground was up to 15G20, luckily from the WNW rather than the forecast NNW.  And the thermals got difficult to find and work.

I hit some turbulence in the lee of Hawks Mountain, enough that my head hit the canopy pretty hard, so I decided maybe it's time to land, even though I've only flown a bit more than 2 hours.  Remembering the sink on the approach to runway 29, I came in close and high, planning to land halfway down that runway.  Once on final I pulled full spoilers - and in a few seconds I was staring at "the numbers" at the approach end.  Wow.  Kept the nose down and closed spoilers and all was well.

OLC loses a sponsor

For many years, we've been posting our flight logs on OLC, the defacto repository for such files, worldwide.  While the website functions as a pretty good online logbook for individuals, its principal emphasis is on ranking and contests.  (The "C" stands for Contest, after all).

OLC did not invent the "Distributed Competition," which is the generic term for what they do.  The original distributed competition was probably the National Ladder in the UK, which has existed continuously since long before the internet.

OLC has spun off subgroups, which are distributed competitions with limited membership.  Examples include SSA, which sponsors an OLC subgroup for its members.  Another example, until recently, was DAeC, the German national aeroclub - the largest in the world.

There are formal and informal subgroups.  Our club is an informal subgroup.  The formal ones pay a fee to OLC to be featured on the website.  It isn't clear how many national aeroclubs sanction OLC to handle their distributed competitions for them.  It isn't even clear how many gliding countries claim to have national distributed competitions at all.  SSA is a formal subgroup, but SSA-OLC isn't an officially recognized national championship in USA.

On the other hand, some countries take distributed competitions just as seriously as their national centralized competitions.  Germany is one of them.  In Germany it is a big deal to be the winner of a national championship, either a competition held at a specific site, or the distributed competition.

Until a few months ago, the official distributed competition for Germany was OLC.  The Germans have now switched to a new one called WeGlide.  The reasons for dropping OLC have not been published, but one can speculate that OLC's receptiveness to suggested changes to the rules might have been a factor.

WeGlide is new, and it improves every day.  However, it must be stated that WeGlide's mission is to do a superior job of running a distributed competition, with special emphasis on doing that job for the German national aeroclub.  A secondary objective is to be a useful repository for clubs and sites, and at a much lower priority, it serves as a personal logbook for individual cross country pilots.

Both OLC and WeGlide are weak at meeting the needs of an individual whose only interest is to keep track of cross-country kilometers for himself and his friends.  (It is amusing to note that OLC has been adding features and relaxing security rules since they were abandoned by DAeC).

There are two other websites for the casual xc pilot to consider, crosscountry.aero, and Skylines.  They have been around for a while, but neither one has crossed over the line into worldwide popularity.  They are both better than the other two for keeping track of your individual achievements.

All four websites have advantages and disadvantages.  In the broadest terms, OLC and WeGlide are aimed at competitive people, while crosscountry.aero and Skylines are for the rest of us.  Also, all four of them are mediocre in terms of detailed flight analysis.  If you want to analyze your flight with every conceivable statistic, you should be using a standalone flight evaluation program, like SeeYou or StrePla.

The difficult question, of course, is which of the four online portals should we use?  I am not an expert at any of them, so I plan to use all of them until I figure out what I want.  It's sort of a pain to upload every flight four times, but I am willing to do that.  It would be nice if each of them would forward your flight log file to the other three, but that happens in only one instance:  Skylines forwards to WeGlide.  So make that three uploads for every flight.  I can handle that.

In a future post, I will describe the pros and cons of each of the four websites.

Big wheel keep on turnin'

 

The advocates of rolling the runway got their wish this year.  Here's hoping they were right!

Weekend report March 27 - 28

 Tim (BU) and Rick (LEL) had a couple of 4 hour flights out of Springfield on Saturday, in thermals and wave.  The conditions were mostly blue.  The clouds were of no help.

Tim made it to 8000 feet in the Okemo wave and measured 29 knots of wind up there.  Rick didn't get as high, but he managed to fly sideways up to Lebanon before falling out of the wave for good.

We had great support from NESA:  Alasdair and Larry on the ground and Jerry in the towplane.  Thanks, guys!

Meanwhile, the runways at Post Mills are still quite squooshy.

New example test questions

 FAA has just published a new collection of example Knowledge Test questions for Private Pilot (Glider).

Weekend report March 20 - 21

 The season got off to a modest start on Sunday at Springfield.

Tim (BU), Rick (LEL), and Dennis showed up on a beautiful afternoon with no clouds and very little wind.  Tim and Rick flew locally for a couple of hours each.  The thermals were weak and widely spaced with the exception of one good one over the summit of Mount Ascutney.  It topped out at 5000 feet, but most of them didn't make it through the inversion at 3500 feet.

NESA flew checkrides in the PW6, so the total number of tows logged by the CallAir was about seven.  They are trying out the new Proving Grounds program, which is supposed to get more people flying cross-country.  It seems a little strange that one of their turnpoints is Lebanon Airport, with a control tower.

It was warm enough to take your time assembling, lubricating, pumping up tires, etc.  The conditions were benign enough that all the rusty pilot mistakes were inconsequential.

First cookout of the year

It was "hangar inspection" day today, and Dennis decided to turn it into a party.  He was joined by Rick, Mary, Tim Keith B, Jeanette, and Greg H for a little bit of work and a lot of hanging out around the grill.

It warmed up to about 35 degF before it was over.

200 km over water

Don't let this happen to you - XVI