While many of you live in areas where flying is shut down, don’t waste the time watching the View (ridiculous), the news (depressing), or the stock market (down right scary). Theres much you can do that will jump start your soaring season once this viral mess is done. Here’s some suggestions, things I do and am doing now:

1. Work on your ship: now is the time to tackle those projects you have been putting off. Cleaning n polish, maybe even sanding n painting. How about that nagging electrical glitch you’ve been living with for many seasons.

2. Bone up on your technical knowledge: Now is a good time to really learn the intricacies of your vario/gps/computer system. Do you still fumble around loading or downloading or changing a task on the fly? Nows a good time to make these things automatic.

3. Read or re-read and study the classics of Soaring: Lincoln, Moffatt, Reichman. There are gems of info in those works that you can extract.

4. Read the back issues of Soaring: During the winter-spring months each year I re-read all the issues from the 1950’s and 60’s. These decades are the most applicable for the type of flying I do ( trying to extract “high performance” from low performance machines requires a different skill set than the modern ships, and these early articles directly apply). There are golden nuggets of info just waiting for us to glean-out in many of these articles. I have been doing this for the last 3 years, and have gained one or two new points each year to incorporate into my flying.

5. Set Goals for this year: Even though your not flying now, thats no excuse for not setting a few goals for this year, be it badges, personal xc or contest goals. This is going to help you get a jump start once we get going again. A few of us guys have made a goal of making an 800km straight line thermal flight with our 1-26’s. It is doable ( hang gliders have done 475 miles from the same area and wx phenomenon), but it takes alot of study and preparation to be ready if/when the wx arrives.

6. If your planning on badge goals or on flying a contest, find and read all the articles regarding the area you will be flying in. Learn the wx, terrain, and idiosycracies of that area. Last winter I spent a number of days looking up every article written over the last 50 years regarding the Moriarty area. The time spent on that excercise served me VERY WELL. lol

Dan