Sunday, May 20, 2012, a few more aerotows

I meant to write this up that evening but I got distracted by other things.

Anyway, after my first three attempts at Aerotowing on Saturday, only one of which was successful, I came back on Sunday to get a few more in. I again used the Falcon 170 for both of my tows on Sunday.

We started out a little bit late but my first try around 11:30 went smoothly. Although I borrowed another students vario and misread my altitude so I ended up releasing at around 1100 feet instead of a full tow to 2000. I tried again immediately and towed to 1600 before I got a hand signal from frank waving me off. I assumed frank waved me off because of a bit of turbulence that the tug had just moved through. He gave me some serious advice before we towed that the conditions were likely to be much rougher and that I needed to be really careful about handing the rough air. This advice made me double my effort to watch the tug for signs that it flew through lift, or signs that would mean I was about to fly through that lift too. And I saw a couple of times that one of the tugs wing would lift suddenly followed by the tug pilot correcting and leveling off, then seconds later, I would fly through the same patch of air and have to make my own adjustments.

However, this wasn't the reason I was waved off. Apparently a 2 engine jet aircraft was making a very low pass over the area, presumably heading in to land north of us in Columbus. Everyone on the ground said that the plane appeared to fly under us, but, Frank, sitting in the cockpit of the tug said that the aircraft passed over us by 800-1000 feet and was maybe 2000 feet out in front of us. He waved me off because of the fear of the down wash of the aircraft. My efforts to carefully watch the tug ended up meaning that I excluded everything else from my attention. I never saw or noticed the close flying aircraft. In any case, I released, and made a U-turn to go back to where I figured lift would be. So by pure luck, I avoided the extreme hazard of the down wash. In the future I need to carefully watch the tug but I also need to be aware of my surroundings as well.You can see the airplane pass by in the top left corner of the video at 11:52.

That second tow on Sunday led to a 17 minute flight in which I worked inconsistent lift.