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!