Another glider story

"BT" wrote in message news:...
300nm round trip today.. not by me.. I was in the office.. but a club
member..
we'll be looking for the posting on OLC..

Jean NV, Tonopah NV and Return..


"Michael Ash" wrote in message
...
Since we seem to have started some sort of tradition of telling glider
stories, here's mine from today.

I wasn't sure if I was going to fly today. Tomorrow is my scheduled day
of
duty at the airfield (one of the small disadvantages of belonging to a
glider club rather than using a commercial operation), and with a
90-minute drive each way I don't like to go out to the airport twice in
the same weekend. But it looked like I might not get another chance for a
cross-country flight for a while, so when the weather looked fine and the
thermal predictions were saying yes, I decided to go for it.

I arrived late morning, put the glider together, ate my lunch, and
launched a little after noon. I asked for a 3,000 foot tow but popped off
early, around 2,500 when we hit a thermal. The thermal was weak and very
tough to center, a pattern which would repeat itself throughout the
flight. However I managed to work my way up to around 3,000ft AGL over
the
city a couple of miles East of the airport. I decided to head North in
search of better lift.

After maxing out at 3,000, I hopped from cloud to cloud and slowly lost
ground as the subsequent thermals just weren't working out well. It
turned
out that only about a third of the clouds had any lift under them, and
the
ones that did weren't very good. My mental landout preparation made a
slow
but steady progression from "look at all the places to land, and I'm
still
in range of the airport too!" to "that area looks promising" to "I think
I'll take a closer look at that field" and finally to "I will land in
*that* field right now if this thermal quits on me".

I spent a surprising amount of time in and near that last state, hopping
from one cloud to another while simulltaneously hopping from one field to
another. After doing this two or three times it finally came down to the
real thing. My thermal really *did* quit on me, and nothing else could be
found. My chosen field at this point was an enormous flat thing right
next
to the river, with a little loop of gravel driveway slicing it in two
about two thirds of the way down. Some power lines crossed the field
parallel to the driveway in the small section, so I decided to land in
the
big part with my final pointed toward the driveway. The plan was to come
in relatively shallow and skip most of the field so I could come to a
stop
conveniently close to the driveway, and this would also give me a lot of
time and options in case I noticed something amiss before touching down.

But nothing was amiss and I made a beautifully smooth landing right where
I wanted to. (Why is it that nobody is ever around to see those?!)

Safely on the ground, my next step was to find somebody and find out
where
I was. My first lead was a pair of shoes and some clothing in the grass
near the river, but unfortunately I couldn't track down its owner. So I
started following the driveway up the other way and finally found some
sort of civilization.

Turns out the field is part of a water treatment plant (I have no idea
why
a water treatment plant needs an airport-sized grass field on a
riverbank,
but there it is) and the driveway was gated and locked. Many Adventures
in
Government followed trying to find someone who could open it, but finally
a worker was found and the glider was retrieved successfully.

All this fun and I only made it 4.7 (statute) miles from the airport!

(Footnote for curious power pilots: see how much fun you can have in a
glider? But I would like to point out that the weather alone did not
force
this landout, nor does it force most. A cautious glider pilot may always
remain within gliding distance of his home airport and never require the
services of unknown fields. So you don't have to worry that flying a
glider necessarily means ending up in fields. Should one so desire, the
risk of ending up in fields can be reduced to about the same as the risk
to a power pilot of doing so, you just don't go that far most of the
time.)

--
Michael Ash
Rogue Amoeba Software