Waiting to see

What the weather will do; AAT set but lot of overcast still.

Duckhawk wing walker- it swivels also, very light and neat, skateboard wheels I think.

Nationals Day 3

Day 3 was a TAT (AAT) of 3.5 hours but this got changed in the air to a 3 hour MAT with 7 turnpoints. Fortunately I had the B task already in my PDA so was not as put-out as some. There were cus all day at about 11,000ft and it was a classic racing day except for one thing - that very last turnpoint - Radar. Radar is as the name would suggest, a radar station. It's at the end of a ravine, a long long way from any landing fields, way up on a mountain peak, and way out to the east, whereas the good flying was forecast to be in the west. So we had a great time with the first 6 turnpoints. Even from 9000ft I just about had glide to Radar and home, but there were absolutely no cu there, and the glide home was into a headwind and totally unlandable for 30 miles. Most people chickened out and glided straight home from the previous turnpoint, even if that meant getting home early. 5 of us headed out to Radar. I quickly lost glide in heavy sink and by the time I turned Radar I was 1200ft below glide at a zero McCready. I turned and headed back into the ravine getting distinctly twitchy. Did I mention that there was also a broad hill on final glide that I had to clear? Anyhow, it got to the point where I had to bail out and head for a distant area of cropped fields. Just as I started to turn toward them, having completely blown the day, I hit a climb. It got me high enough to carry on towards the finish, and not only that but a cloud street formed leading straight there, in what had been completely blue! I cleared that hill by a good 800-1000ft and then had to red-line to get down. In the end I was 3rd for the day and moved back up to 2nd overall. Whew!

Here's a photo I took of my wing runner just before hooking on, his sunnies caught my eye...

Nationals Day 2

Day 2 was all about timing. I was early on the grid, and we have about 15 miles to fly from the drop zone to the start gate. So if you are last on the grid it can be impossible to get to the start gate before the window opens. Heavy cirrus was pushing in from the west, and forecast to get heavier, so although it was a blue day I decided it was a good idea to head off straight away. My first leg was south along the high mountains shaded by the cirrus - so I was low in and out of the crags. There was some jaw-droppingly beautiful scenery - crystal blue lakes still surrounded by snow and razor back ridges - but I was too busy to get out the camera right then. Climbs were weak but went to about 10,000 (not that far above terrain). The second leg was further east, backtracking north but on the opposite side of the valley. By this stage the cirrus had moved across and was now shading leg #2. Doh! I took a big detour and went back along the original side of the valley, then cut across. Meanwhile all the late starters were zooming along with great cus to guide them. At TP3 the main gaggle caught up with me and the rest of the day was fast if frustrating. Being a MAT task we had to make up our own turnpoints at the end. I ended up 5th for the day and dropped from 1st to 4th overall. Still, it is a 10-day comp so it's still early days.

MAT

Modified assigned area task, 3.5 hrs.

Here is a pic of the mighty duckhawk piloted by Chip Garner.

And some increasing high cirrus... Yikes!

Also Allan preparing in the hanger, a private hanger loaned for the comp, full of big model aircraft as well.

Std Class Nationals Day 1

Well Day 1 was somewhat a test of the size of one's family jewels. The task was a 3.5 hr AAT, running down the west side of the valley, then crossing past Mt Shasta to the east way out into the badlands, then returning by a similar route. Unfortunately the convergence line did not develop as forecast, so we had to creep across onto the lower slopes of Mt Shasta, which are very shallow. The few clouds girdling the mountain did not work well, and when we did finally connect with the clouds at 10,000ft we still only had about 4000ft ground clearance flying in over the forestry and lava lakes. You had to take every thermal just to stay in touch with an escape route! A lot of people were lower than me and that was my only consolation. I made a lot of silly mistakes but apparently fewer than everyone else, as the preliminary scores show that I've got a narrow lead of about 9 points. I don't know if I can face 10 days of this!

Here's a photo of one of the lava lakes - the nearest landing option is off in the far right distance. Ground clearance about 4000ft. By the way the internet here is so slow that it has taken me over an hour to load this photo...

Well what a day! The second practice day of the comp, but only 5 or 6 people launched because the forecast was to deteriorate to rain by the mid afternoon. Wave was all over the sky so I decided to have a go.

I took an aerotow to 4500ft (2000AGL) and worked my way up to cloudbase at 9000 in about 2kts. I then pushed forward and found some thermal shear wave...

 Then I dived across the valley to the east and climbed under some rotor cloud to 10,000 ft with my target in sight...





























And pushed forward towards the mountain until I hit the lift - started out as a rough 14kt but soon smoothed out to 10kt. I just pointed straight into wind and held it there at 50kt airspeed and hardly moved forward over the ground...this photo looking east from about 18,000 ft.








The wave slowly reduced to about 3 or 4 kt at 23000ft and Mt Shasta was spectacular...

Mt Shasta from 23,232 feet

So I dived down to make it home before all the slots closed in, and just made it onto the strip as the rain started.

What a day! The competition proper starts tomorrow.

Sunset at Siskyou

Wave boy!

Allan just nipped up to Mt Shasta ( in background) to get his diamond, down in time for afternoon tea/ beers! Thanks must go to Richard ( of craggy Aero) for arranging airspace and explaining tactics etc!

Well Done Allan. (he stopped at 23000 as weather is closing in, de- rigging now.

Early morning view

...of Mt Shasta and Pawnee at Siskyou county airport. Shasta has 3 glaciers, I guess two are in view from here, if I understand the definition of glacier.

Some pics from Crater Lake

It really was this blue! The little island is called Wizard Island

Also an old (still used) railroad bridge over a stunning gorge at a viewpoint we camped at overnight. (And so did several trucks - earplugs needed as 2 ran generators all night, probably to keep the heating on as it was cold).

Great day at Montague

No internet coverage here so I am posting from my phone. A great first day at the site of the Std/18m Nationals. Cloudbase 11500 and the fantastic backdrop of Mt Shasta (14,000 ft) in the background. Here's a shot taken from just over 10,000ft at 6pm.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Duckhawks And Perlan

I will try to keep this short.

Bend, Oregon. Greg showed us around where they are making the duckhawk and building the Perlan gproject glider .

For those who don't know, the DuckHawk is composite (carbon fibre) aircraft so very light and strong, and as Allan has seen can fly very fast and has impressive energy retention. Chip flew it in the nationals at Mifflin and won with it. They make all the rigs, molds, etc in house; totally all made here in US.

Checkout Winward Performance website for more detail.

The Perlan Project is also being built here and we saw some amazing bits and pieces. Perlan is the project to fly a glider to 90000"( in a pressurised cockpit), which is incredibly Amazing - the moon mission of our time! This will be an amazing achievement! Here is Allan in the cockpit mockup, Greg is helping him in.

They still need funds, all donations gratefully received.

And then we went to Crater Lake, and saw some amazing sights. When I process the pics of the Fuji I will upload some; here's some off the iphone. Including Grommit navigating us through several feet of snow...

P.s. I have not increased the saturation, that is what it looked like!

On way to Mr St Helen's

Here is a section of stone tree, from the Petrified Ginko forest, we passed on way to Seattle; it rained all the time almost in Seattle and we never saw the sun. Also the cafe that 'cafe nervosa' in Frasier TV series was based on just closed down - we visited the sci-fi. And rock (music) exhibit at the Seattle Centre. Didn't go up the space needle, had great vegetarian dinner last night at cafe flora. Best meal yet in USA !

Here is me controlling an avatar in a scene from the movie...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Z5GvoSPFQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player

No pic

As we went to the Boeing Factory and did the tour: excellent!

Metal man

...attacked in Seattle park, while another looks on.

And the tree picture- just for Leschy, is NOT snapseeded in any way: the trees are blue- and we are now in a brewery bar on Pike drinking Bavarian triple, thang dog for auto spell...

End of comp

Allan won today, and the comp for Standard Class. Didn't take a picture of him getting his prize ( a book of the Washington scablands) but here is the sunset we saw on way back to RV to get a beer. Just visible in the foreground is a segment of a wind turbine tower which are manufactured here.

FAB

Thunderbirds are go!

Well open class right now, but probably all will go. Task B and it's 14:30

Still possible

Waiting for temp to climb to trigger of 29.

How do you like the Genesis2 towout!

Blue day - Day 3 of the Ephrata Regionals. AAT Task Waterville / Creston / Mansfield / Wilson Ck. I decided to play cautiously and stayed high. All went quite well until the 4th leg when i saw a huge dust devil forming up ahead and steamed off towards it at 90kt. Just as I got there it fell to pieces and I found only turbulence. I then had to glide across the ravine quite low but caught a nice climb at Soap Lake. Then my major blunder - my movable turnpoint was set pretty much over Grant County International Airport and I didn't realise this until I was about 10 miles from it.  I called them up at 5 miles and they told me not to proceed overhead but to turn for Ephrata immediately. I ended up 4 minutes early as a result. Doh!

Here's a nice shot of the Grand Coolee Gorge with Banks Lake. We fly over this at least once on most tasks. Sorry about the reflections!

Chilly evening in Grand Teton

Shortly Allan will update with details of the days flying till then here's a coold photo.

Day 3 Cancelled - pilots fly to 17000ft

Today was cancelled on the grid at 1pm as the sniffer could not climb above 5000ft. There was also significant high cover. I thought the call was a little premature but decided not to fly as there was shopping to do at Walmart and we wanted to have a look at the Dry Falls. When we got back to the airfield, people were landing after having climbed to 17000 ft in wave. The sky was packed with wave bars. Arrrgh! We could have done the task in a single glide!

Here's a shot of the Dry Falls - according to geologists this was once the largest waterfall on earth, created when a huge ice-age lake burst its ice-wall dam and flooded the plains with billions of cubic metres of water in just a few days. Makes the Brisbane Floods seem like a dribble really... This is part of the 3-mile 1000ft escarpment that the flood flowed over.

No fly today it didn't slip slide away,,,

Crazy Still life After all these Years

About another 150 to go

(excerpt from Wikipedia)

The Crazy Horse Memorial is a mountain monument complex that is under construction on privately held land in the Black Hills, in Custer County, South Dakota. It represents Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota warrior, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial was commissioned by Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski. It is operated by the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation, a private non-profit organization.

The memorial consists of the mountain carving (monument), the Indian Museum of North America, and the Native American Cultural Center. The monument is being carved out of Thunderhead Mountain on land considered sacred by some Oglala Lakota, between Custer and Hill City, roughly 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. The sculpture's final dimensions are planned to be 641 feet (195 m) wide and 563 feet (172 m) high. The head of Crazy Horse will be 87 feet (27 m) high; by comparison, the heads of the four U.S. Presidents at Mount Rushmore are each 60 feet (18 m) high.

(excerpt end)

.

The model, clearly a work of art in itself was done by the original artist. He has since died, and his family continue to dynamite the mountain to recreate the model... The scale is realised when you see the diggers and earthmoving equipment at the bottom of the sculpture. I believe the nose on the face is about the same size as the figures on Mt Rushmore, which by the way is only about 20 miles away. The Z family are all involved and it is clearly a lifetimes work for them, and their descendants should they so choose! Lets hope it doesn't take quite as long for the high cloud I see out of the window to disperse, as it is not supposed to be here according to the forecast...

Day 2 at Ephrata - Dust Devils and Convergence

Well day 2 has come and gone - strong winds straight off the plateau at 90 degrees to the runway made it doubtful we would get a day. Prior to launch a huge dust devil raced through the tiedown area and trashed all our stuff. We had a bucket last seen at 1000ft and all the cleaning cloths and polish gone without trace. My heavy duty canopy cover in its bag got dragged right out onto the runway. They launched us soon after and it all came good. Over here there is a 5 mile radius start area with a max altitude. You can start out the side of the cylinder or out the top. Today I wanted to start out the top in order to get a longer downwind first leg, and I just managed to scrape above 8000ft to achieve that. The first leg was mostly in the blue but there was an intriguing cloud street running crosswind way off in the distance. I decided to push deep into the first area and try to connect with it, hoping it would line up with the second leg. Fortunately my cunning plan worked and I found good lift. The second leg was mainly dolphining along near base, in what turned out to be a convergence between the hot westerly and the outflow from a line of storms to the east. There was the odd classic convergence dags which regularly worked. The orientation of the circles allowed me to run back along the same line on the 3rd leg until I had about 1.5 miles per minute left to run. At that point I turned for home and needed just one climb to 10500 to get onto final glide into wind. The glide was pretty uneventful and I got in just above the 1000ft regulation finish height. I think. The scores will tell.

Here's the only shot I took today - pre-start - of the airfield from about 7500ft.

Waiting in cross wind

All gridded, quite windy 10-25 mph west (we are on 22). Also drop zone in the picture is immediately downwind of plateau ridge! Not sure if it will be drop zone today?

Dustier starting to bring the rubbish over from Walmart...

Er , just found out that dust devil also had the contents of our cleaning bucket in it- and the bucket! Also nearly lost the heavy duty canopy cove; was some distance from tie down fortunately only a little dirt got in, an I have got it all cleaned. Whew -:/

Native American toilet!

The ports loos at Ionia were supplied by "AmeriCan".

This one beats that, especially with the motto!

Day 1 - a result!

Today they called a 2.5 hour TAT (AAT) for all classes. The sky was already overdeveloping by the time we launched, so I headed off as soon as the gate was open. 3 minutes into the flight I discovered that my Oudie had somehow reset to yesterday's task, so I turned around and reloaded the correct task before making a second start. The two guys who were with me kept going, so I ended up on my own. Area 1 was 95% overcast so I was planning to cut it short and go deep into area 2 which had a good cu field. By the time I started the second leg, area 2 was almost totally suppressed by high cover sweeping in from the west. Change of plan - cut area 2 short even though the 3rd area was overcast with approaching rain. There were two possibilities - it would work and I could go deep into area 3, or it wouldn't, and I would come home early but avoid a landout. As it happened there was lift in front of the rain and I managed to get home 4 minutes over time - I love it when it works out like that! 4 minutes after landing it was raining at the field.

When the scores were posted, CR and I were joint 1st place - the first time I have ever seen that in the scores. We were lucky to be the first class off - the Sports class had about 50% landout.

Here's another photo from the practice day.

Praire Bitch and The End of The World...

Some miscellaneous pics from the Badlands:

The old photo shows the inside of missile command for minutemen 2 missile control, before it was buried. Look at the door that Allan is next too - is this paranoia or what! There were also massive dampers on the whole structure. The chair pictured is showing the locked key box for the two keys to the final part of the launch sequence; out of picture to the left is the other key slot, both need to be turned together. I could show you that picture, but then I'd have to shoot you...

High cirrus puts drop area in shade

Not enough time left in day to task now, it's not very warm forecast now only to get to 25 so day canned. Allan gone up for an explore...

You can see some of the culprit below. I'm off to Walmart for supplies!