Visibility: Excellent
Wind: Light. Two gusts of 13 MPH @ 2:02 & 2:07 PM
Altitudes: Alex; 3800 MSL
Time Aloft: Alex; 1 hour, 47 minutes
Max Lift: Not much.
Temperature: 83°F @ noon, broad peak of 87°F during the afternoon.
Comment: Slow Day!
Tow pilot: Jan Zanutto most of the day, then Andrew for the last tow of the day.
A good description would be broad areas of gently descending air, with a few fingers of air that rose. Not many people had signed up for gliding today--they probably all looked at the RASP and decided, "Why bother?"
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| High Resolution Hcrit prediction for 3PM this afternoon. |
Jan Zanutto did all the towing for the day except for the last tow, when Andrew Ouellet towed Jan for a ride. Jan was getting good at finding and circling in the little bit of lift to be found. Even from the ground, it was obvious to see the difference in climb rate when Jan circled in the lift. It looked pretty neat, too, watching the two planes climb while "dancing" round and round.
Mike Paoli put fresh tape on the 1:26 and it looks much better. Then he took it up a couple of times for a slow descent home.
Andrew Ouellet made a couple of flight in Orange Crush with a guest, then took the 1:26 up for a downhill ride.
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| Andrew Ouellet taking off on the second flight with his guest. |
Alex Caldwell put his beautiful Nimbus together and took it up. With Nimbus's glide ratio and its ability to stay up in light lift, he was able to head for the ridge and work the lift there for over an hour, with a total aloft time of 1:47.
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| Alex ready for takeoff. Picture taken by Jan Zanutto from the towplane. |
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| A few seconds later Andrew Ouellet grabs this picture of Jan and Alex taking off. |
Here is Alex's own account of the day:
I was up in the Nimbus today for
1 hour 47 minutes. I spent most of the time ridge soaring between Tar Canyon and
the power lines. Occasionally, a thermal would come through while I was ridge
soaring, and I could get up to about 3600 ft. MSL. Later, as I was getting ready
to land, I found out there were thermals out over the Valley along highway 31 which were just
as good as along the ridge, and also got me to 3600-3700 MSL. I could have
made more OLC distance, I think, by flying out in the valley and covering more
ground there, because I would have had a higher altitude AGL to work with than
over the ridge, where I was just scraping the hills and was very limited as to
where I could go.
Here's a link to my OLC (On-line
Contest) info for my flight today:
I did not get an official
score, because my handicap distance was just under the minimum required 50km
handicap distance.
I used the program or app
called "XCSoar" on my Android phone to record the .igc file that I uploaded to
the OLC. I have a USB plug connected to my glider's battery, so I can run the
phone for a long flight. The standard phone battery would not last for very long
without external power.
I also experimented with the new
SSA supported live tracking app today that also runs on the Android phone at the
same time as XCSoar. It's called "GlideTrack." It is a very simple to run
program/app. It uploads your .igc file as a track that can be displayed in your
"locator URL" web page. You can get to your locator URL page from the SSA web
site at Soaring Society of America -> Member Resources
-> Sailplane Tracker by typing in the pilot's name or the glider contest
number once you are registered with them. It appeared to work quite well.
Here's a link to the SSA tracker URL page at Avenal Airport. You have to find
the contest no. IB and select it's track. If the date has changed since the
flight was made, you can use the calendar selector to go back to a previous day.
It defaults to the current day.
The SSA tracker has a lot of
really cool features, such as the 3-D view using the Google Earth Plugin, and
it gives altitude, speed, and direction information at almost continuous 4 second
intervals, unlike SPOT, which only gives info roughly every 10 minutes and gives
no altitude, speed, or heading info. The only complaint I would have is that it
only works in the Google Chrome browser. If you try to look at it in Internet Explorer
or even Firefox on Linux, or for that matter, Chrome on the Android phone,
nothing works right, and the display makes no sense. It needs a simplified version that runs without all the fancy features for a non-Google Chrome
browser. This is important, because If a wife or friend tried to find you, and
they don't know it needs Chrome, they'll be out of luck, and it won't help them
find you when it's really needed.
Alex
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Soaring
Society of America
SSA.org
- The Soaring Society of America's web site is the largest collection of
information in the world about soaring, also known as
gliding.
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Jan Zanutto had the last launch of the day, choosing to take up the 1:26 instead of pulling out his own bird. Lift had not been very good at the peak of the day, and by now it was 3:30 and what little lift there had been there was starting to fade.
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| Jan Zanutto and the Ravens, which are much closer to the camera than Jan is. |
The long days of the summer soaring season are apparently over...Jan is the last landing of the day, at 3:50 PM.
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| Jan Zanutto makes the fianl landing of the day |
