My path to Pilot

There was strong weather on Saturday, but Sunday looked good for towing (at least until the rain was supposed to show up). After sharing my earlier videos with some other pilots online they had a bunch of criticisms for me. Some of the concerns they had included flying without wheels on the glider, how slowly I seemed to be flying, how I didn't seem to ever have a flight plan, how I was progressing too quickly, and how I didn't have the fundamentals down and was being reckless. I was kinda blown away. Personally, I've felt comfortable, in control, and I've been having a huge amount of fun. In any case, if an experienced pilot gives me feedback I'm going to carefully consider it. So I went to the training field with a number of these things in mind to work on. First was experiencing a wider range of speed in the glider. If I have been flying too slowly I want to be able to recognize that for myself. So I want to become familiar with all the different speeds. Flyi...

    The weather forecast clearly showed winds that would be too strong to tow in, but they were nearly perfect (strength and direction) for the local ridge soaring site. So the plan was to spend the day at the ridge, and look for an opportunity for a few of us students to do our first foot launch/ridge soaring flight. Greg and Noel, both recent H2's, were here for their first ridge flights too.     We met at Wesmar (the training field) and packed up the gliders to take to the ridge. On the way to the ridge, I took the Hang 2 written test. I passed! I primarily missed questions about airspace and sectional maps, but also a question about how quickly high performance gliders turn when compared to beginner/intermediate gliders. I will submit my paperwork to USHPA this week to officially become a Novice Hang Glider pilot.      Once we got to the ridge the conditions really did look perfect. They were a little bit stronger than I had ever...

Another excellent weekend weather forecast! I showed up Saturday morning with some good ideas about what I wanted to work on: Landings, and smooth control. I think the calm conditions helped quite a bit in the smooth control department so I had a bunch of what I thought were gentle and controlled flights. Occasionally though, I would get a little bit of rough air and I would find myself over correcting and oscillating again. As for landings I think I made a huge improvement by the end of the day on Saturday. I'm more reliably rounding off the approach and timing an aggressive flair in order to put my feet down with minimal ground speed. Landing into a nice steady breeze helped too though! I was also able to progress from straight flights to boxing the field (making a series of 90 degree turns to fly around the perimeter of the field) and setup for a landing into the wind. Once though, I misinterpreted the wind-Tee and thought that it was pointing in the direction the wind was b...