November 5 and 6

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 blowing, so I had to run out a down wind landing. I now know that the wind-Tee points into the wind! I was also getting longer and higher tows and have been racking up the flight time at a minute or more each flight! This also gave me the chance to try a more intermediate maneuver, a 360 degree turn. I also took the Hang 1 written test on Saturday and missed 3 of the 48 questions. I have a few concepts to study up on but I have a good enough understanding of the topics to qualify for a Beginner rating.

When I came back on Sunday morning we had a slow start while I found a prone harness that would fit me. The conditions were a bit windier than the day before. I took one flight before noon and found it to be somewhat rough or at least stronger than I had flown in before. I made no attempt to get prone, and touched the control bar just for a second, just to see how it would feel. One of the other beginner students with a few days less experience than me had too much trouble with the strong and somewhat variable conditions, so he called it after a couple attempts at tows. After a flight each we decided to wait around in the hope that conditions would improve. I almost drove home, but decided to just relax for a bit and wait. Boy am I glad I did wait.

Around 1:30pm it improved slightly and we decided to try flying again. But there were only 2 of us students left at that point. So He (a new H2 pilot) and I traded long tows into somewhat buoyant conditions (there was lift occasionally!). I'm absolutely loving the longer flights. I think my longest was more than 3 minutes! I got to work more on longer and faster turns both 180 and 360 degrees. The faster turns are a skill that will be necessary to stay in columns of thermal lift or to use in order to loose altitude before setting up to land. I'm now getting my feet into the pod harness (a harness that looks something like a sleeping bag in that it encloses you up to the chest.) and using the control bar instead of the down tubes during flight. I'm also getting more consistent with landings, repeating Saturdays good landings and even achieving a few no-step landings.

The final achievement for me this weekend was learning to cart launch. Instead of running the glider into the air when the winch starts pulling, the wheeled cart lets you set up the glider and start off prone, this way, when the winch starts pulling at full tension, you roll along the ground until the glider flies off the cart. This is how aero-towing is accomplished since you couldn't possible run along the ground far enough and fast enough for an airplane to take off while pulling you along. I had 5 cart launches before the end of the day but only recorded the first of them on video.

Despite the fact that this is the longest video so far, I still didn't manage to capture all my flights. Another student had a similar camera to mine, so we were able to record ourselves from 2 different angles. Both of our cameras ran our of batteries before the end of the day on Saturday and Sunday. I especially regret this because some of my last flights at the end of the day on Sunday were fantastic.

Here's my video, it's lengthy this time since I ended up getting so many flights but check it out. I think the most interesting flights are on the second day at 13:37