Early season Sierra Wave flight

[[email protected]]

Reading about the ridge flight in Utah reminded me that I should post
some details of the wave flight that I had on the 23rd of Sept. I fly
with the Sierra Soaring Club out of Inyokern CA. Friday I was
scheduled to take a family friend for a ride. He is a 17 year old who
is interested in flying fighters for the military someday. I left for
the airport at around noon and the wind was just howling in the valley
but once I got to the airport the wind was light and variable. I met
up with the friend and his father and we started to preflight the
Blanik L-23 and get it ready for flight. Our tow pilot takes the 182A
towplane out for the warm-up flight and reports that he is flying
through rotor. He lands and we get set up for the tow on runway 33.
Normally we tow out from runway 20 but by this time the wind is aobut
15 knots blowing straight down 33. We launch and I found myself in
probably the roughest air that I have experienced in a long time.
Typical Sierra Wave rotor as I am told. We towed up into the mouth of
the Indian Wells Canyon and at 4,400 feet above field elevation we
released into the wave. I flew figure eights always turning into the
wind and about 15 minutes later we were skirting along at 14,000 feet
MSL. The challenge at this point was to stay under 14k. The Blanik we
were flying is not equipped with an oxygen system, otherwise I think
that we could have easilly rode the wave up to 18k. So we skirted
along flying a racetrack pattern from Inyokern to Pearsonville. After
our half hour at altitude was up I opened the divebreaks all the way
and brought us below 12,500. Once again it was difficult to stay at
this altitude and not climb. After about an hour and 45 minutes of
wave flying I brought us back into the valley and we did some zero-g
porposing and some lazy-8's to blead off altitude. My friend loved the
minor acrobatics, one of these times we need to get him up in the
ASK-21 and do some real acro. I landed the Blanik on the dirt runway
parallel to runway 20 and we had a total of 2.2 hours flying. It was
unexpected to find wave so early in the season. January through April
is typically the best time of year for wave at Inyokern in my
experience. So it was a great fun flight that I thought that I would
share with everybody.

Alex

[Fred]

Alex:

Thanks for confirming what I suspected: Friday's wave extended well
north and south along the eastern face of the Sierras. We had two wave
flights out of Minden the same day, in strong winds. The first one
took off about 12:30 and turned around at 18,000' because they only
carried cannulas. I took off about 2:00 with a student, both of us
carrying A-14 equipment so we could try to get up into higher wave in
the Minden West Wave Window.

We towed to about 8,200' (3,500' AGL) in some rough rotor, and had to
sniff a little east and west until we could find the up side to work.
We worked that to just a little less than 14,000', where we finally
emerged into smooth lift that pegged the vario at 1,000 FPM. That was
about two miles east of Heavenly, about over the sewer pond. I called
down to the front desk and had them call Oakland Center to ask for
Minden West, and they called back just a few minutes later to say
Oakland Center had too much traffic in the area and had turned us down.
By that time we were just over 17,000'. We put on full spoilers and
picked the speed up and were able to hold at 18,000'. From that
vantage point we could see good solid wave clouds as far as the eye
could see both north and south. I think we could have made it 50 miles
north very quickly, but with the southerly component I wasn't sure how
we would fare coming back south. We finally turned to the south end of
the Carson Valley and ran the face of the Sierras south of
Gardnerville. It was slow progress because the wind speed was high
enough that we had to hold a pretty big crab. I estimate the wind
speed at 18,000' at more than 45 kts, but didn't have a GPS to confirm
that. Clouds were filling in pretty fast by 3:00, so we crossed to the
east of the valley and found the down side. Even then, we flew into
the secondary as we were working our way home and could easily have
climbed right on up again.

My student is from Denmark and was happy to have experienced the Minden
Wave. I'm just sorry we couldn't get the window open. Maybe next
time. Fred