Another landout today

tonycondon

tonycondon

Gastons CRO (Chief Dinner Reservation Officer)
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Tony
forecasts for today were looking soarable, although perhaps a little marginal due to winds out of the southeast. I launched about 1 PM after the CAP glider had gone up and reported a little lift. My tow went fairly quickly, there was definitely a lot of lift up there. I managed to core a decent 300ish fpm thermal and got up to around 3000 AGL. I figured if i could find a thermal there i could there must be others so i set out downwind, to the northwest. i worked cloud to cloud over town and lost very little altitude. in fact over 7 or 8 miles i barely lost 500 feet. I knew from previous experience that on a day like this its very foolish to get low, plus i wasnt seeing a lot of open fields out in front of me so i worked on finding lift around my area. i found a few scraps here and there but kept creeping lower and lower. I had a cow pasture and a couple of baled hay fields under me.

I kept creeping down, and of course had a smaller and smaller radius of action to work in in order to keep my fields as options. I entered downwind to land and of course found a thermal and managed to start climbing! hoo rah i thought, I may be able to save this. I climbed a whopping 500 feet before losing the thermal. Wind was really breaking things up making it very difficult to work. I scratched around the area a little more but finally had to give it up and land. The pasture looked pretty nice from the air, a bit of a slope from left to right and a few hay bales. trees on the approach and departure ends. looked like enough room to get down and stopped though, particularly with the headwind on final.

coming in over the trees was a little nerve wracking as i just kept waiting for the hand of god to come down and smack me into them. cleared them by a fair margin and then did a full slip with airbrakes out to get touched down as early as possible. once down it was obvious i would easily stop so i let it roll as long as possible. turns out the pasture was right next to a friends farm and they were out working, so got to say hi. always nice to see a friendly face on a landout. my favorite picture so far is attached, Matt got some great pictures of me on the hay bale that i cant wait to see.

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oh yea its doing well. hardly put a scratch on the glider this time.
 
Cool... I'm still at the point where I'm a bit nervous just landing at the home 'drome; must be interesting to just find yourself somewhere and have to make do. :fcross:

I still haven't decided if this gliding business will keep me young or take years off my life! :D
 
Tony, thanks for sharing.

A couple of questions... Why look to downwind? One, it's further downwind of your intended landing; two, doesn't weather (ie, thermals) form from the upwind at the same spot?)

How did you lose the lift? To a non-soaring pilot it sounds like you couldn't circle back to the lift. Intuitively that doesn't make sense. Do you mean the lift, you know, just disappeared ie, vanished?

If so, then could you not predict that? Was it just a crappy lift day?
 
richard,

if i was truly trying to stay local to the airport then i would've searched upwind for another thermal. Yesterday i was trying to make a cross country flight though which is why i set out downwind.

a few reasons why i may have lost the lift. perhaps the thermal just became disorganized. the wind was blowing strong enough that its very likely that the thermal got broken up. also quite possible that while fighting the turbulence while circling i just lost track of where it was at.
 
So what happens now? Do you take apart the plane and have it trucked to the airport?
 
matt came out to the field with my car and trailer. the wings and horizontal stabilizer come off the glider and everything slides into the trailer, which is now sitting in my hangar.
 
Richard said:
Tony, thanks for sharing.

<snip>
How did you lose the lift? To a non-soaring pilot it sounds like you couldn't circle back to the lift. Intuitively that doesn't make sense. Do you mean the lift, you know, just disappeared ie, vanished?

<snip>
Click to expand...

Weak thermals often go up in bubbles. Think of how bubbles form and rise in boiling water. Since the glider is always (mostly) descending at about 150ft/min relative to the air around it, it is quite possible to just fall out of the bottom of the bubble.

As thermals become stronger they become more continuous and less bubble like.

It is quite possible to lose a thermal and come back 10 minutes later and find the next bubble rising in the exact same spot. If you are to low when you lose it, you end up landing.

I alway enjoy hearing of Tony's adventures thank you.

Brian Case
CFIIG/ASEL
HP16T N16VP
 
Don't be discouraged, Tony. One of these days you'll figure out how to make it back to land at the airport. :D :D :D
 
And sometimes you get off tow in what you think is a good thermal, only to discover that you can't find the damn thing. Last Saturday I got off at 2000' in what I thought was a pretty good thermal only to find myself at pattern alt 3 minutes later. I damn near beat the tug to the ground :).

At least the second flight of the day (2 1/2 hours) was a lot better.
 
yea pete i call those towplane assisted thermals. seems sometimes you hit a small bump on tow and if the towpilot pulls a bit to slow down at the same time it seems like you are in really great lift. until you release

chris - i hope not!
 
Yeah we call those "Charlie Thermals" :) In all fairness though this is only his second season of towing, and he's goten a lot better. Although in his defense I waited too long to pull the release. I saw the pawnee shoot up first, and then felt myself go up. So I'm pretty sure it was user error on my part :)
 
Builds character,
 
It's true that you can't go on assumptions... even more so than in powered flying. Got to always be ready to prepare to land.

More than once already I've had my instructor say "hah, you flew out of it !"(meaning a thermal), only to see him take the controls for a sec to try to get back in... and it's gone.

Then there's other times I've turned in without much expectation, only to find I've caught a huge thermal.

The wind can break up thermals or flatten them out...hard to know where they will top out, too, especially if you're not working an obvious one under a big cloud or whatever.


There's a whole new world of visualization that needs to be developed flying gliders: where the lift might be, where the sink might be... and at any moment, on a local flight, how exactly you will enter the pattern to land.

So far this summer I've noticed a few fairly reliable sources of heat near the airport, but even they can disappoint, and strong sink, especially, can surprise you anytime, it seems.
 
Haha I love the "aerial" shot from the hay bale
 
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