Landing Practice, Hang 3 Written Test, and a Harness Failure

This weekend is the last before the Team Challenge starts at Hensons Gap. I wanted to get some landing practice in and take my Hang 3 written test, which would be the last requirement to earn the certification. This would be necessary to attend the Team Challenge as a competitor and not just a free flyer.

The landing practice went great, and on each tow I tried pretty hard to find a bit of lift to get up, but I never managed it. Larry W. and Dan both got flights longer than 20 minutes. Larry's might have been closer to an hour, but it could have been one of those days where you needed both precise flying and some good luck to launch in time to catch a rare thermal that was well defined and workable below 600 feet.

On my 4th tow I had a failure of the dangle angle limiter on my harness. This is the cord that attaches between the carabiner at the hang point and the harness right at the back of the neck. The point is to keep the harness from tipping head down past the prone position. During scooter towing this dangle angle limiter gets loaded with some large portion of the tow force while the mains hold the force of your weight and some smaller portion of the tow force. In my case my dangle angle limiter, which was a braid-on-braid cord, (hollow single weave rope constructed around a smaller rope core) had a severely worn sheath at a point inside the harness and during tow, the sheath broke and was pulled down by the cleat holding the end. This resulted in the dangle angle limiter lengthening suddenly on tow. A longer limiter meant that my head was allowed to be pulled further beneath the control bar by the force of the tow.

Check out the video I recorded of the tow. I show my first 3 landings and then my entire 4th tow. On the 4th tow you can see the fray just barely showing behind my neck.

I went to my local Climbing Gym and bought some 5mm cordlette that I think will be a strong and appropriate replacement for the failed limiter.

I also took my hang 3 written test and missed 8 questions out of 50. So I passed. And John was finally able to sign me off for Hang 3. I don't remember all the questions I missed but a few stuck out. There was one that asked what the best approach would be for a tight landing area in high wind. I chose the traditional aircraft approach, but it's obvious to me now that I think about it that the figure 8 approach allows you to make your turn to final and almost any time so that it becomes easier to judge the altitude required to not over shoot. I also missed a question that asked about the speed to fly if you are in sinking air with a high tail wind if you want to fly the farthest over the ground. I chose best L/D thinking that no matter what kind of air you're in, sinking or rising, you go farthest at best L/D. In actuality the key is the tail wind, which pushes you much further over the ground than the difference between best L/D and min sink. Which means that the correct answer is minimum sink or equivalently slower than best L/D.

Anyway, I think I'm ready to go to Team Challenge next week.

A New Season is Nearly Finished!

This post is quite late, but I have recently gotten the inspiration to re-continue this effort. So I'll try to catch up on what I've done so far this year.

Date: March 2013

I didn't fly at all in the winter. After the season ended in November the winter began setting in and no training took place. I was happy doing lots of other things in the cold weather. But once March hit and things began warming up, I did get back out for some scooter towing. In fact that first day was surprisingly good! I had 5 tows that day, the first 4 of which were good landing practice and short flights. I quickly realized the effect that even four months can have on your landing abilities. I had one real bad landing that was a belly landing and a sudden whack that resulted in a slightly sprained elbow. Despite that, I quickly gained some confidence back and on the 5th flight, I found some nicely workable lift and ended up soaring for over an hour! I climbed in a few separate thermals and enjoyed boating around high over the north east end Wesmar.

In April and May I had a few more weekends and some weekday evenings of training flights. I feel like I'm now as good as I've ever been with consistent approaches, and flares for comfortable landings.

The most recent day of flights was in June 22. I was the second person at the field around 10:00 am and was the first to start towing. There were a few spectators there (bicyclists on a ride through the area) and I was happy to get the first tow in and demonstrate our launches and landings. I think they were impressed! I had three rapid fire tows, each short and only encountering the very lightest lift. I also experienced quite a bit of drift in the lift that I could find. The wind was 5-9 mph and out of the SW. So we towed long way where the traditional aircraft approach (DBF) for a landing at the launch end of the field would require the base leg along the power lines. It's always a more nervous approach than the other end of the field where you have enormous empty fields to make an approach over and only a few tall trees to worry about. I think I was consistent and was able to stay safely away from the power lines, although I did find a little bit of rotor that was generated by a nearby house just upwind of my base leg. A strong rotor in just the wrong spot could force a turn into the power lines in the worse case scenario.

Anyway, after those first three tows, I started taking turns with Matt D. and some of the other pilots that started arriving. In the end I got 7 scooter tows and one flight 24 minutes long. On that flight I climbed to 1800 feet after a 950 foot tow. Throughout the day we were dealing with very strong drift that would carry you quite far downwind of the launch end of the field, which meant that any commitment to a thermal would likely require landing out. So I was never able to do it until the end of the day when the wind backed off a little bit and I was able to catch a thermal passing through right at the end of my tow. Larry W. was talking about how this marginal sort of day is really typical of "pre-frontal" days when we have winds out of the southwest. The better day would be the "post-frontal" days in which we have northeasterly winds. And looking back at my longer flights at Wesmar, they were all but one out of the north east. It's those days that I'll have to keep an eye out for in the future.

I'm overall happy with the start of my season and look forward to a few more soaring flights in these hot days.

Another new development this season is the dragonfly operation out of Carry's. A private field towing site near Cincinnati. It's 20 minutes closer to me than Wesmar is, but I have the problem of storing my glider at Wesmar, so any trip to Cincinnati to fly would first require a trip to Wesmar. I've really got to find a good way of storing my glider at home in Dayton. At the moment it is nearly impossible to store it in my apartment on the third floor of the building. I'll have to consider renting a garage, or storage unit or something.

I'm also looking forward to the Tennessee Tree Toppers Team Challenge again this year. I'm going to try to make it for the entire week instead of just the first few days. And hopefully I'll have my H3 by then so that I can participate in the competition instead of just free flying.

I've got new goals to work toward and I think I've got a great foundation of skills to continue improving on this year!