Backpack repack

If you've ever wondered what's inside that expensive seat cushion, you could ask this guy:


Click here to see Skip's photo-documentation of his recent trip to Pepperell, Massachusetts.

Boredom Fighter

OK, it's winter, and you need something to do. Today's trivia challenge is to identify both aircraft in this photograph, and the location where it was taken. A fabulous prize awaits you.

Photos from the trip

If anyone is interested, there are pictures from my version of this escapade into southern climes beginning here.

Use the My Photo menu to access the remaining 5 photo sets arranged chronologically from left to right (most recent to oldest) on the first line of the photolinks.

JS

Gorham Photos

Over 2B9 at 1145, today...

Through the magic of the internet, you can also HEAR the towplane as it actually was at the moment this photo was taken. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Cover your ears

2. Close your eyes

3. Hold your breath

4. And listen.

Soaring Seminar II

Day 2, AM Session

Lee Kuhlke, correctly identified as an "oral surgeon extraordinaire," addressed a near and dear topic, "Beginning Cross Country" to start the day off. He passed along a number of gems which follow. Raptors are fun to thermal with, but be extremely watchful if they soar up and over you. Any drawing in of the claws or closing of the feet together is a sign of aggression and apparently large hawks and eagles have made more than one assault on a canopy causing considerable and costly damage in the willful strike. This caveat aside, he outlined several speakable rules which need repeating in flight: 1) Never get low; 2) Never proceed over unlandable terrain without safe altitude; 3) An ASW-27 (and other similar gliders) sink on average at 2.5 knots, a 2-33 sinks at 3.5 knots: updrafts must be at least as strong as this to be of any practical use; 4) Use the 3-5 Second Rule: The distance traveled in 1 second at 60 knots is 100 feet -- given the radius of turn at moderate bank angles, a thermal is probably not worth stopping for (i.e., its diameter is insufficient to make full turns worthwhile) at this speed if it doesn't pass the 5-second test -- at 90 knots it would be 3 seconds; 5) For most gliders, the optimal thermaling bank angle is 35-40 degrees, and in most gliders instruments are mounted with screws in a square pattern. The diagonal represents 45 degrees: this line on a high, center-panel ASI, for instance, can then can be used as an angle-of-bank reference; 6) At or above 3000' agl, fly aggressively. Between 3000 and 1000' agl, seek landable fields and take any thermal at 1000' (or your safe lowpoint--Lee's is 600' agl, but he's been at this a while. Once committed to a landing, don't second-guess your decision; 7) Perception of height above ground fails over 1500' agl; 8) Cloud shadow tracks are not necessarily indicative of ground wind direction; 9) Never land under a wire; 10) Never land in dark dirt (it is wet and sudden stops with pilot whiplash often ensue; 11) Don't join the White Stripe Club (landing a white glider gear up on black pavement leaves a white stripe for all to see...); 12) Barbwire is often strung under tension, so never cut it to retrieve your glider. He next reviewed several pre-outlanding checklists but none seemed close to Rick's all-encompassing (Size-Orientation-Slope-Surface-Obstacles-Street), and I choose to omit them here. I know that I may be presumptuous here, but U-STALL and WWSSR just didn't work for me and, in my judgment, left out one or the other of the important SOS/SOS components (see if Rick comments otherwise below); or they just seemed redundant, i.e., the LL in U-STALL implores us to LOOK (outside the cockpit) and LAND (the glider).

[Aside: in the flight from State College to Philadelphia, I was picking fields and found one particularly appropriate: length of 4 football fields, so about 1200' or a little over 1/2 of Post Mills' glider runway, which is where many of us roll out; east/west orientation (the windsock back at State College Airport had been straight out and from the west); flat valley floor, so no slope; plowed light-tan furrows without any green yet, plowed parallel to the wind direction(so no field vegetation: if you can see furrows, the plantings are not yet over 2 feet high and landing there is safe--without furrows, however, higher plantings can be expected and you run you the very real risk of a quick groundloop on entering the corn, etc., with glider damage or worse to be expected); no trees, fences, tractors or farm animals about; and, finally the field terminated at a deep black roadway perpendicular to the west end of the field. Further inspection confirmed this roadway to be demarcated in its center by a dashed white line that ran due north, up to a turn-off point where a tiedown area for 100 general aviation aircraft resided. This made me chuckle, of course. What would they think of me landing in that field when a perfectly good runway lay just ahead. The answer is not immediately self-evident.]

This decision point had arisen at the meeting: if you have the choice, land on a runway UNLESS the wind dictates otherwise. On this day, a high cross-wind landing would probably have been a bad decision.

Mark Keene took on Advanced Cross Country - regaling us with tales of winning one championship contest in a 1-26, and of averaging 120mph for 25 miles in a Discus repeatedly over a non-cloud street course during another contest, but his real advice was to plan your day's flying well in advance to ensure such outcomes. 1) PREPARE YOUR GEAR: food and water (for flight and outlanding time); locator: SPOT (suggested, see previous post), cell phone (may not always have service), ELT (good for general location notification but only pinpoint if GPS-enabled and not many are); charge all battery-dependent devices in full; survival satchel (including emergency kit, air horn, LED bicycle headlight, Swiss Army knife or universal tool, reflecting mirror); 2) PLAN YOUR FLIGHT AND SET A GOAL: avoid "touring" ; talk with local pilots before arrival at the flightline; expect weather to vary considerably en route; 3) FLY: KEEP MOVING THE WHOLE TIME; fly the height band (the sweet spot is not always at the top of each thermal, but does, in general, rise as the day goes on); on weak days, set the Macready Ring to one half of your last three thermals averaged (so, if the last three thermals are averaging 6 knots, you should set the ring to 3.0); KEEP MOVING FORWARD: the lower you get the more chance you'll encounter a thermal, albeit a weaker one, than if you stay where there isn't one at all; DON'T GIVE UP: find a landable field and a backup field in case the first reveals an unexpected obstacle, rock trench, etc.; search for lift but DON'T DRIFT AWAY from your 2 fields; once you are committed to land: LAND THE GLIDER; if you save the flight, DON'T RE-LIVE THE LOW POINT: congratulate yourself and move on. As the day ends, recognize that you will be tired, hungry, thirsty, and maybe mouth-breathing shallowly and need to prevent these. Stay nourished, hydrated, peeing (Q90min) and express occasional forced yawns, sighs or deep breaths. Finally, after you land, ANALYZE your flight with someone else and learn what you might have done differently to improve your skills.

Richard Kellerman concluded the AM Session with his outstandingly understandable PowerPoint on Thermal Forecasting: he has offered to send his slides so if anyone is interested, please let me know. His topic was laced with physics, meteorology and graphs which I have never comprehended. After Richard was done, I now can predict cloud base height from a skew-T graph (given predicted daytime temperatures and the morning dew point and so long as the closest balloon sounding data is available), I can believe Dr. Jack's blipmaps for what they are: excellent mathematical models but lacking in hard data for foundation (Dr. Jack predicted blue thermal tops of 4K on Seminar Day 1, Richard predicted 5.5K, and pilots flying at Mifflin returned to report max gains to 5.2K agl), and I know how to type in "FXUS61KCTP" on the web so as not to have to bother with any of the above...

Day 2, Afternoon

After lunch, Dale Kramer, aided by his wife, Carmen, and wingman John Good, recounted Dale's tale of sheer thrill for 200miles at 100mph, 100 feet above the Allegheny ridge on a cold and snowy day in mid-April last year, countered by the three seconds of sheer terror he experienced while crashing his LS-8 into that ridge having no control authority or just plain "mush" despite an IAS of 53 knots, followed by the arduous and painful steps and waiting that ultimately lead to his rescue 24 hours later with the outcome never entirely certain until his six month stay at the University of Pittsburgh's Level 1 Trauma Center and subsequent rehabilitation were negotiated. The details of this flight and crash are found in Soaring magazine, lacking only the anguish audible in the speakers voices evident at the meeting.

Regrettably, due to travel home, I missed Frank Pascale's presentation on Installing a Transponder, but if the NTSB letter released today to the SSA about the subject is any indication, I probably should have taken a later flight home myself.

This meeting is a highly recommended must which can only serve to solidify the skills we all have now due to the hard-fought efforts of our Club Instructors who, by the way, are all quite well-known in the soaring community (some because they still owe money back in Pennsylvania...). I for one, however, am very grateful to come home to them and learn some more.

Soaring Seminar I

This year's Soaring Seminar 2008, sponsored by Knauff & Grove, began today at the Ramada Inn in State College, PA. Upwards of 80 glider pilots are in attendance, most from the northeast, especially PA and NJ judging by SSA window stickers and corresponding license plates on the vehicles in the parking lot outside the convention center, as one would expect. In general, the crowd is respectful and serious but lightheartedness emerges at the appropriate junctures. A number of new computer hardware/software items (vide infra) as well as hard-to-find soaring texts ranging from Sailplane Design (for the aerodynamicists) to Competing In Gliders (which qualified for "must read" status recently in a rec.aviation.soaring thread, primarily for its erudition in both contest and cross-country matters) were offered for sale to the discerning attendee.

Day 1, AM Session

When Dave Pixton began the meeting on "The State of the SSA" with these two words: "Rick Sheppe," I knew I was home. Dave recounted the history of the SSA's current FRTF, or Future Restructuring Task Force, which was the direct offshoot of the ad hoc committee Rick single-handedly germinated and brought to fruition over a year ago to help set the SSA straight. The FRTF has made major strides since in the reorganization of the SSA although several major concepts are still in need of making forward progress. Much has hinged on the now successful restructuring of the finances of the SSA, the details of which are detailed on the SSA website (as Dave necessarily and repeatedly defaulted to in the course of his report).

Dianne Black-Nixon spoke next confirming the salutary nature of the SSAs balance sheets, emphasizing that, "The state of the SSA is the best we've ever seen." She noted that streamlining is in process including the amalgamation of the four Regions 1 and 3, and 2 and 4, into two separate regional entities, respectively. She has also offered to match up to $25,000 in donations to the SSA by way of a bequest in her will. So far, the matching funds are up to $7,500, so there is a ways to go to, as she inferred, "make my heirs $25K poorer."

Denise Layton received well-deserved recognition for her hard work in taking over the day to day running of the SSA since 6.06, when the organization's financial faux pas was first discovered. Ironically, she came by her job with the SSA some 21 years ago next week when her predecessor was arrested for another addiction (drugs, not gambling, in that instance). She walked into the offices of the then SSA president, wondering if there might be a employment for her with him (having been tipped off the preceding day by her policewoman friend that an opening was likely to become available in the next 24 hours). Denise and 6 other employees (down from 14 total) made the last 18 months work by, among other cost-containment measures, her personally approving any use of the color photocopier and commanding that emptied plastic garbage bags would be reutilized. All this came to light from Denise's first-ever platform presentation for which she also received a well-deservedly warm and extended round of applause.

Lee Kuhlke, Boulder, CO dentist-extraordinaire, began the technical portion of the morning session with a three-part, in-depth review of SPOT, a handheld device which will: 1) send a predetermined "OK" text message with your current GPS coordiates and altitude, to your retrieve crew awaiting your jaunty contact; 2) broadcast a Q5min (every 5 minutes) <911> Emergency message until cancelled (or the batteries run out, ~17 days) destined for the GEOS Emergency Alliance Office where a human being will within 30 min initiate a GPS-coordinate directed SAR operation to find and help you; 3) broadcast your preinserted HELP message via email and text messaging Q5min for one hour or until cancelled; or 4) and BEST OF ALL, allow you to initiate and maintain automatic Q10min tracking messages to your designee(s)'s computer(s) that then autodepict onto a google.maps overlay your progress en route for interested parties (spouses, creditors, cheering fans, NASCAR race crash enthusiasts, your retrieve crew). This function will also indicate an automatic google.maps overlay of directions from your parked car and trailer or any other designated point of origin to your landout GPS coordinates once your forward progress ceases. Lee followed this with a summary of the utility of FLARM (FLight alARM), the European VFR glider collision-avoidance device which is a long way from service here in the USA, providing convincing evidence of its efficacy, but also noting that, for it to work, all gliders in the your region need one. Thus, they are only being marketed to clubs or larger soaring groups in the USA at this time. Until they generalize throughout the aviation community, other general aviation, commercial, and military aircraft will remain able to see you/your glider only if you are carrying an operating transponder. His last subject was PDAs and PNAs (personal navigation assistants), concluding that the 3850 model currently offers the most in terms of superior visibility, large-scale selector buttons and acceptable processing speed for glider pilot activity, recognizing that panel-mounted glide computers really do all that is needed, that the PDAs biggest 'pro' is depiction of landable sites within reach of your glider in its current location, and its biggest 'con' being the distractability factor which may interfere with effective head-out-of-the-cockpit attention.

Day 1, PM Session

Dan Somers, Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Penn State University, led off the afternoon session with a concise review of airfoil function, noting that the degree of airfoil smoothness is highly overrated in terms of its significance to lift and drag parameters. Apparently, circular erosion of smooth airfoil did not detract from laminar flow or increase drag to any measurable extent until cabinet-maker's grade sandpaper (40-grit) was employed, in NACA data dating back to 1938-42. Bugs on the leading edge are considerable larger than 40-grit related ridges. He also discussed boundary layer properties and the resoundingly incorrect data derived from over the wing oil-flow experiments often reported in the soaring literature. The defining test is an extended medical stethoscope oriented parallel to the airflow across the wing surface. When silent, airflow is laminar. With boundary layer separation occurs, turbulence and a roaring sound develops. Easily affixed to your wing, polyethylene tubing can be run from any point on your wing's surface to direct sound back to your ears in the cockpit. He concluded with a brief unveiling of a new (proprietary) twin, tandem airfoil design which has demonstrated an intact boundary layer over nearly 100% of the upper wing surface of the leading airfoil, 60% of the upper surface of the trailing airfoil, and over nearly 100% of the lower wing surfaces of both the leading and trailing airfoils, resulting in an effective improvement in lift of 50% over and above that of the current E603 airfoil currently found on the Twin Astir.

Mark Maughmer, also Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at PSU, but better known as "Professor Winglet," confirmed that flyable gliders were actually products of academic engineering design projects and built in 6 university settings in the USA prior to their advent in Aachen, Germany, in the 1920s. The precedent was the Cornell Glider No. 3, circa 1912. Little interest, however, existed in these aircraft during WWI, with powered flight assuming precedence, and so whether any of them actually were flown first in the US before those flown in Germany, is doubtful. He also reasoned that the Wrights graced their Flyers with a canard horizontal stabilizer to preclude the fate that befell Otto Lillienthal who broke his neck in a glider crash and died a week later, having not afforded himself the benefit of this protective forward extension. He finally addressed the tale of the two drags, induced and profile (parasite), concluded that, "Zero times infinity is not necessarily nothing," that the compromise achieved between these two drag forces is optimized at the apex of the glider's polar, and that glider winglets basically improve slow-flight performance by reducing induced drag via the dispersal of wingtip vortices into less concentrated swirls of [drag-enhancing] energy. Induced-drag is less of an issue at higher velocities and, at cross-country cruising speeds, the major concern with winglets is how much their wetted area adds to profile drag. The major factor in that regard is the toe angle, the angle at which the winglet (which is always canted outward from the midline by 2-5 degrees depending on the glider's airfoil) is ALSO rotated either inward or outward in the vertical plane when viewed from above. The predominant benefit occurs with slight (1 degree) outward rotation of the entire winglet, achieving anywhere from a 0.5-2% increase in cruise velocity at low thermal strengths, i.e., 2-4 knots, when compared with more or less severe, including internal (negative), rotation. Doesn't sound like much, but around a long course, this benefit garners reduced time on task and increased points (for those who are counting). In the end, winglets yield a several percent reduction in induced drag at slow speeds and a minimal increase in profile drag at cruise. That these two drag forces are inseparable results in a compromise in winglet design which is unique for each glider make. Mark is personally responsible for many of the various winglets you see on gliders today.

Richard Fucci next gave an inspiring talk on the Freedom's Wings Program which has allowed disabled persons to take up soaring. This program has been featured in Soaring magazine as well as on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and Mike Tiabbi reporting. "Fucch" (pronounced 'few-ch') was an A7 Attack Squadron pilot on the USS Kennedy and, subsequently, after his naval aviator's career, a commercial airline pilot, before suffering a career-altering spinal cord injury in 1977. He took up soaring in 1997, and achieved his commercial glider rating two years later. An additional actuator similar to the spoiler handle and push rod assembly allow the pilot to "push" right rudder and "pull" left rudder, making spoiler actuation problematic in the pattern. This is solved by notching a spoiler plate beneath the handle to allow four fixed spoiler settings. The proximity of these two handles allows for adding or removing spoilers while managing the rudder handle as needed after a few flights. Support for this worthy program comes from donated time at glider manufacturers who install the modifications and field volunteers who help with pilot ingress and egress. The smiles on the faces of all participants at the annual Philadelphia Glider Council's Disabled Glider Pilots Weekend bespoke the reward of our sport to all who take to the skies in gliders. The next event is scheduled for 5.31-6.1.08. Their website has more details.

John Murray spoke eloquently on the vagaries and legion failures of our glider trailer maintenance behavior in general. He addressed tongue failure and trailer checklist inspection points, proper installation of 6-foot long, 5/16th inch chains starting from glider chassis bolts (not flanged rings w/drilled holes which fail), "brake jobs" pre- and post-1996 (when sealed bearing became the norm on Cobra trailers), proper assessment of handbrake and hydraulic chamber function, tire and clamshell gas-strut replacement concerns, and the wiring vagaries of German glider trailers in particular. John hawked the new split tailwheel assembly offered by Tost, an icepick electric wire tester to help check the location of wire failure in tail-light outage situations, and the new ASG-29 which can be had for a mere $150K, among other things.

The final speaker was Stan Faust who effectively lambasted the FAA from stem to stern, er, from nose-vent to total energy probe, for its bureaucratic inefficiencies, inertia and inbreeding. If you know Bob Hoover's saga, you know most of this, too, but it was intersting that the first Pilot's License #1 was issued to William P. MacCracken and the first woman's Pilot License #199 to Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie. Omlie was a charter member of the Ninety Nines, but it wasn't due to her license number. There were <99> original women members in the group, hence, their handle.

Day I concluded with a sumptuous banquet replete with an after-dinner glider pilot standup comic (is their any difference?), whose routine was so lame (his admission), he was given rousing rounds of applause for the long silences between his jokes.