On Sat, 30 May 2020 15:25:15 -0700, agcatflyr wrote:

Charles, please don’t take the wrong perspective from our posts. Its not
true to say there is no safe way to fly xc and that whatever you do
carries a high chance of damage to yourself and-or your ship. That is
simply not true.

If you do as recommended in learning to land your ship very efficiently,
minimum and exact speed control, (your PW can land as short as our
1-26’s, Ive seen it done at the 1-26 Championship/Low Performance
contest last year),AND pick routes which have a generous supply of open
fields, you can very safely do lots of xc. You don’t need big wings and
super high performance ships. In fact, a very good argument can be made
that the small, slower speed ships are easier and safer to fly xc given
that the availability of landable fields for us is much greater than
the 18-20 meter ships.

As for an area where you can climb high enough to go from airport to
airport, thats a pretty tall order for a low performance ship. The area
you fly around central georgia is very landout-field friendly. You can
easily work out a few courses starting with google earth, picking
potential landout fields spaced if you like every 10 or even down to 5
mile spacing. Then take a weekend drive and check them out from the
ground or get a power plane buddy and fly the route checking them out.
Easy piesy, absolutely safe.

If you want to go somewhere to fly xc with an abundance of humongous
landable fields, Sunflower aerodrome in KS would be a fine place, or
Lawrenceburg IL.

I think you simply need to do a little homework finding out how far you
can fly given 2,000 ft of altitude, plan a few simple triangles,
practice your short field/spot landing skills, then go for it. You can
over think this thing to the point where you end up too frightened to
ever go anywhere. Many of us have had first xc/landout jitters but went,
did a flight, maybe landed out successfully. And afterwards realized it
not such a big scary deal after all.
Dan

Another way that might work for you is to do the height and duration legs
of silver C first: both can be done with local flying and should be
useful in convincing yourself that you CAN climb more than 3270 ft above
release height and that you can stay up for 5 hours. Then think about
setting a self-declared task of making a flight of more than 50km ending
at a known landable airfield. If you can set a 50km flight over mostly-
landable country and downwind as well, so much the better, and if you've
never visited the destination field that doesn't matter - in fact you'll
learn more if you haven't seen it but just been told is good.

This is exactly how Silver C was done on my club. I did the height and
duration legs soaring locally and then, after getting instructor signoffs
for field selection, field landing practise, and navigation (without GPS
- it was that long ago) I was told to map-read my way to a gliding club
about 65 km away that I had never visited, and land there so I got useful
practise landing at a previously unknown airfield - in fact I sat in a
thermal off to one side to work out the traffic pattern, joined the
circuit and landed there to be offered congratulations and a beer.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org