Extending new pilot comfort zone?

On Jan 7, 7:19*am, tstock wrote:
Hi everyone, I've been reading "Advanced Soaring Made Easy" by Bernard
Eckey, and this is a fantastic book for a new pilot. *It does discuss
learning to get out of the comfort zone of flying safely within glide
range of the airport. *This is something I am just venturing into
myself and I was curious how some of you went about this when you were
learning?

When and how did you cut the strings for the first time? Was it with
an instructor? Did you do it in small steps, or did you just plan a
cross country flight? *Or did you land out by accident once and get
thrown over that initial fear?

Since I am still renting a glider, it can be a bit of a problem if I
land out, but I would like to start flying a bit further outside my
comfort zone.

I was considering asking a more experienced pilot if I could "ride
along" with them on a cross country flight to help me get over the
butterflies.

Any advice appreciated,
Tom

Reflecting on my own experience I'd say:

1) Find a way to simulate an outlanding. I know part of my pre-solo
training involved landing at an unfamiliar airport, followed by an
aerotow back home. In that case the other airport was a few miles away
so there was no real risk in getting there. If that doesn't work for
you it helps a lot just doing landings at your own field where you
cover up the altimeter and mark off on the runway where you "clear the
trees at the threshold" versus "need to stop before the cattle fence".

2) Do your Silver distance. If you can manage it do it on a day where
you can get high enough that you always have either the home airfield
or the destination airfield well within gliding distance. Letting go
of the home airport is a big psychological step. Even though I lived
on the east coast at the time I did my Sliver distance in Arizona
where even in a 1-26 you could more or less have the destination
dialed in before you left home.

3) Start setting tasks that allow you to fly "airport to airport"
where you always have a runway within gliding distance. With today's
flight computers this is pretty easy to do, but you can also use a
tool like GlidePlan to make custom charts that tell you how high you
need to be to get to an airport from wherever you are
(www.glideplan.com). Practice picking out landable fields as you fly
around (even today I do this - from my glider and from my car).

4) Offer to go on retrieves at a contest. Getting to see for real what
an outlanding looks like takes some of the mystery out of it.

5) Fly XC with an experienced pilot. I never did this myself until I
had a lot of experience already, but with modern 2-seaters this is
much more doable and a great experience. If you can do it at a
contest so much the better. Some top competition pilots raise funds
for the US team by selling back seats in Duos at contests.

6) Start to submit flights to OLC. You need a logger for this, so by
now you'll be pretty serious about getting away from the field.
Tracking your XC miles is great positive feedback.

7) Buy a share in a glider and enter a contest in the sports class.
Okay, that's pretty far down the path...

Good luck.

9B

Tom, you're reading a great book and the above posts contain a lot of
good advice. If you have access to experienced mentors with a decent
performing dual ship, definitely take advantage of that. It may not
help with the butterflies much, but you'll probably learn a lot.
There is no substitute for taking that step away from the safety net
on your own. I own a Duo and take less experienced pilots up any
time I can and I've done a lot of coaching from the back seat since
buying it. 300+km flights often end with big smiles and amazing
stories for them, but the first time that they get out of glide from
the airport and make it back on their own, it is a whole different
world of ear-to-ear grins, even if it was only 10 or 15 miles away.

Planning and preparation will probably help with the fear more than
anything. Confidence in your ability to land the glider exactly where
you want at minimum energy without using the altimeter is critical in
my mind. If you have very solid thermalling skills, make sure that
you are launching early and landing late or flying on weak days so
that you experience weaker lift. Being very good at finding and
working weak and broken lift will also boost your confidence since it
means you'll be less likely to need your landout skills. Plan your
route. Fly it with someone in a dual ship if possible so that they
can point out common places for lift or sink or the good landing
options. If they will let you, be responsible for as many of the
decisions as possible when you fly it. Drive the route, check out the
landing options on foot if possible. The fewer variables you have to
consider on your first flight, the more confident you will be.

Finally, apprehension and nerves are a good thing and we've all
experienced them at some point or even routinely. I find that as I
head out XC and I'm getting towards the edge of gliding range back to
home, my brain switches over when the glide computer (or your Mk I
eyeball) says we are out of reach. It's very liberating, since no
longer is the home airport a concern, because you can't just glide
back to it.

Hopefully you have access to good mentors and instructors that know
you, your skills and your desire to get into XC. Make sure you're
asking the same questions of them as you are here.

Morgan

On Fri, 07 Jan 2011 20:58:35 -0800, Morgan wrote:

Planning and preparation will probably help with the fear more than
anything. Confidence in your ability to land the glider exactly where
you want at minimum energy without using the altimeter is critical in my
mind.

Yes, good points - especially the point about not using the altimeter,
which *will* be telling lies during a field landing since you won't know
how high the field is.

Along with that goes not getting reliant on ground features round the
home field.

It strikes me that a decent final glide computer might be a good pre-xc
confidence builder. I'm thinking of something cheap and portable like
XCSoar or LK8000 running on a Binatone B.350 satnav. Of course, that does
require a way to mount it in the glider you're using.

The advantages are two-fold:

(1) you can get familiar with this type of instrument before you use it on
xc flights
(2) if you set a cautious safety altitude[1], make sure the
glider's polar is selected and load a task with your home field as
the single turn point, the glide computer will continuously show you
where home is and how much you're above the glide path back to there.
In the right conditions you can extend the local soaring[2] quite
considerably.

I'll do this if I'm just local soaring on a non xc day. On one of those
flights I knew that I had reached the local soaring limit when I was 35
km away from home, but I was upwind of home and at 5300 ft at that point.
I'd also confirmed that the final glide computer was, if anything,
conservative in its calculations on previous, shorter flights.

Using such an instrument in the way I've described and gradually
extending your local soaring radius should give you confidence that your
instruments and (hopefully, steadily improving judgment) aren't
misleading you about your ability to spot your home field and get back to
it. You can also fly mini-triangles[3] round your field, which will
vastly improve your navigational skills and your ability to use lift to
fly along a predetermined course.

[1] The 'safety height' is the target arrival height AGL at the
turnpoint. The computer uses this along with wind speed, wind
direction and the glider's polar when deciding if you're above or
below the glide path.

[2] 'Local soaring' in the UK means being within gliding distance of
home, i.e. that you can get there without needing a climb. UK rules
also require you to have a map onboard if you're more than 5 miles
from the home airfield.

[3] Mini-triangles are small practise tasks that you mark on your map
and/or set as a task in the glide computer before take-off. You fly
them as though they are an xc task. They are quite short (15 - 20
miles) and with the turnpoints chosen so you're never more than 5-8
miles from home. In good conditions you might fly two or more laps
in the same flight.

--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

Many potentially-useful and helpful insights have come before...good stuff.

That said, here's a one-word attempt at additional context: KISS.

Ask yourself why it is *you* have your 'not done it yet' XC fears. If they're
rationally based, odds are they'll all more or less boil down to fear of
breaking something (ideally, the glider/your butt!).

Next ask yourself why these fears exist.

Lastly, take the simplest actions designed to sensibly remove those fears'
underlying causes. (Hint: none of the simple actions have anything to do with
electricity, computers or technology, as evidenced by the fact that safe,
accident-free XC was being performed by newbies way back in the 1930's...or,
almost before real people existed. WARNING: Readers wishing not to be exposed
to dry humor should skip the sentence preceding this one!!!)

Anecdotal example of successful use of KISS Principle applied to 1st-XC follows...
- - - - - -

Context - newly licensed glider-only pilot, 23-years old, hugely ignorant
about 'this soaring thing' but definitely hooked. All prior experience
entirely in a 2-33 (~14.5 hrs) and a 1-26 (~ 31 hrs), all in Cumberland,
(mountainous, western) MD. Natural fear (plus native common sense and lack of
lift?!?) underlay the lots-of-'OFL-practice' shown in the logbook as part of
the above stick time, said OFL practice consisting mostly of practicing short
landings over imaginary approach obstacles onto different 'spots' of an
unfamiliar paved runway, trying to ignore the altimeter (and, in rain, being
forced to ignore the non-functioning airspeed indicator).

Then exactly one month after licensing, my fellow newbie glider-only-time
ship-partner(& decade older 'geezer') in the 1-26 built (and now 'suddenly'
but-one-third-owned by our former instructor), suggested the 3 of us go
out-of-state to another club's 3-day-weekend fun fall contest. ("Hey! It's in
the flatlands of Ohio; what could go wrong?!?" "Well, for two, I could bust
the ship and my butt...")

I resolved to at least get one thermal away from the home field (and try to
get back, ha ha) before contest weekend, then less than 2 weeks away, before
mentally committing to the idea of actually *intentionally* going XC, no
matter how many other maniacs populated my nearby airspace over the wilds of
Ohio. And a great plan it was...even though it also resulted in my first-ever
OFL when timing conspired to have me choose my 'one thermal away' on the
trailing edge of the thermic airmass adjoining one more worthy of useful
performance testing. How embarrassing. How alarming! How...do I manage to not
bust the glider/my butt when I am obviously not going to make it back to the
airport? (Hey, at least my test condition was validated!) The KISS-based input
of my instructor combined with my own fears worked just fine for the
entirely-unwanted situation and I wound up landing in the Potomac River
bottoms in the only field (pasture, ugh) around I deemed even remotely
acceptable (it was great, of course), about 3 air-miles from the airport.

Next weekend (in Ohio) I went out and placed 4th (of 12) on a 35-mile O&R 1-26
course, judged my final glide so well I easily remained aloft to bag my
5-hour, and averaged a whopping 12 mph. (Those ahead of me had obviously
cheated or lied, given their claimed speeds twice that of mine. Those behind
me had all landed out, the incompetent twits...wait!...one of those twits was
the then-reigning 1-26 National Champion. There might be more to this sport
than is first apparent...!)

The next day fellow newbie and I retrieved our former instructor from *his*
(first!) landout, that latter fact being divulged only after we were returning
to the airport, glider in tow. (No WONDER he'd seemed so genuinely happy when
they retrieved me the previous weekend!)

That was all it took for me to conquer my XC demons/fears/worries...beLIEVing
that what I'd been taught/gleaned about how to pick a field would work. The
bad news is that if you ever do break anything on an OFL (35+ years and ~20
OFL's later, I haven't yet), if you're honest with yourself, you'll have to
live with the conclusion that odds are it was *your* fault. (Human eyesight
isn't sufficiently good to completely eliminate the inherent terrain
micro-surface risks associated with OFLs, but those things tend 'merely' to
induce gear-related damage, not include life-threatening risks.)

For me, doing basic skills and field-assessment homework beforehand, and
scrupulously applying the proper lessons, proved a liberating, powerful
approach. Everything else is 'just' experience...which will come with
continued time and exposure, neither of which will invalidate those necessary
basics.
- - - - - -

Have fun!!!

Regards,
Bob W.