November 20

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. Flying faster is straight forward, but I'll have to discuss stalling with my instructor before I try slowing down intentionally. As for planning flights, I was just going to try to have a good idea of where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to land before I got on tow each time.

In the end I ran into the situation where I should have deviated from my planned flight for safety. Each of my flights was going to be some variation of the following: At the end of my tow, when I had the most altitude, I would practice a maneuver (a 360 degree turn, 180's, or something similar), and then fly back to the end of the field I started on to set up for a landing. On one tow, just like the tow before, I practiced doing a 360 turn with some speed and then flew down field to setup and land. But I had significantly less height than I did on the tow before and ended up making a very low to the ground turn to final. Nearly touching a wing to the ground mid turn. I have lots to learn about judging the altitude lost during a strait glide and the altitude lost during a turn and how to anticipate whether or not I have the altitude required for the flight I had planned.

We kept towing when it started drizzling lightly and only stopped when it started raining properly. In total I got 10 tows and feel I made a little more progress but uncovered a few more things to work on. To summarize, I certainly did fly faster, and spent quite a bit of time pulling in from trim, and also made a better effort to plan out my flights. The next thing I will have to work on are my turns. I am still not coordinating my turns quite right and end up stopping and having to re-initiate the turn before I'm heading the direction I intended. I think this is from over correcting after I initiate the turn instead of just centering myself on the control bar but it could also be from pushing out too much during the turn and causing the lowered wing to stall. I did manage a couple of good constant speed 360's though so I just have to work on being consistent.

Although the flights were nothing but sled rides from the top of tow to the landing, I did get a chance to work on some little things and hope to get many more training days like this before the real winter gets here.