The different air masses, the different instruments
ect. ect.
obviously lead to different results. Not being the
physic's expert, I was just wondering if anyone has
tried flight testing Sailplanes in a wind tunnel? Could
you 'hard point' it and measure weights or lack of
weight to get Polar info. Im sure boeing or MD has
done something like that. I suppose that you may not
get a direct glide ratio but could get a common start
point that all gliders then could be compared to. Any
comment from the mathematicians?



At 14:00 29 December 2004, Andy Blackburn wrote:

This original idea has now morphed into a suggestion
essentially to replicate the technique used by Dick
Johnson and others, with the main difference being
using the barometric altitude transducer in a flight
computer instead of the mechanical altimeter(?). This
might offer some improvement in accuracy, but is at
least as complex to execute as the flight test techniques
used for the past 40+ years.

There are two main challenges with using flight logs
only:

1) There is no good source for IAS, so you have to
try to estimate it from GPS ground speed.

2) Typical soaring flights don't involve adequately
calm vertical airmass movement and probably not constant
enough airspeed to trust even long glides of many tens
of miles.

9B