Average OLC flown distance by glider

I dunno. Booming thermals, high cloudbase -- you
could probably do 1000km in a PW5 in Namibia
if you just took one there.

You could, right.
But reality is narrower: usually no one does.
Last but not least: when coping with normal averages, still possible exceptions are averaged out, by definition.

What could happen in theory is one thing, I see your point. What *usually* happens is what I care most for GliderReview.

I dunno. Booming thermals, high cloudbase -- you could probably do 1000km in a PW5 in Namibia if you just took one there.

Arizona is not Namibia, but we do have some spectacular thermal soaring, often with high cloud base. One of our members, Mike Parker, flew a World Record distance in a PW5 of 626 km here about ten years ago. Not sure about 1000 km, but 850 km looks doable.

Mike

On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 8:41:58 PM UTC-5, DG300PI wrote:
Interesting to see these figures but wat do they actually mean?
- the high-end gliders are more often flown by high-end pilots
- what has to be taken into account is the number of gliders per type that are present in certain locations with good, average or less good gliding conditions.
For example, no one ships his/hers Ka8 to Namibia or Australia to fly distance records and you will typically find the more experienced pilots over there.

or less experienced rich ones....

or less experienced rich ones....

Still that would imply a correlation between income and that glider, which is among the main focuses of GliderReview.

Once again: solving the problem of TONS of, say, PW-5 being flown in Namibia is good for academia and thought experiments, but GliderReview is meant to cope with pragmatical retrieval of information about a bunch of market-relevant gliders.

Perhaps you can show price per LD point?

Roel,

Perhaps you can show price per LD point?

That idea was proposed by my friend Stefano Cherchi a few weeks ago.
I am considering it since that day. We'll see!

Thank you for your comment though, it is definitely inspiring.

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Jacopo

On Wednesday, January 18, 2017 at 9:06:53 AM UTC-5, wrote:
Perhaps you can show price per LD point?

i don't think thats a relevant metric. how often do we really fly at best L/D speed? best L/D is somewhat irrelevant. If all they were focused on was raw L/D, I'm sure they could make gliders with extraodinary L/D's, but they are trying to optimize the performance over a wide range of speeds.

On Tuesday, January 17, 2017 at 10:32:44 AM UTC-5, Jacopo Romei wrote:
Hello everybody,

as a newbie, I often find myself wondering
- how far a specific glider can be pushed
- how far a specific glider can be pushed by *its* average pilot

The second point is very important because, as obvious as it may sound, no glider "gets there" alone and it surely must be matched by a pilot with related skills.

By the way, end-to-end, I thought that crunching & aggregating some yearly OLC data, I could find a relevant answer.

As of today, on gliderreview.com every glider is shown along with its average flight lenght in the previous year. That allows for anyone to get both information: how far is any glider usually flown and, most important, how far outside of my comfort zone any glider is.

Sure this is based on OLC-uploaded flights only, but still any statistics is based on sampling and OLC to me is a quite reliable and representative data population. In other words: crunching 14 thousands flights will be enough for me to get the idea. ;-)

Enjoy!

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Jacopo

i think there are too many variables to draw a reliable conclusion. i am also starting to think that you'd be surprised how far a specific glider can be pushed. people often takeoff too late and land too early. daniel sahzins 1000k in a 1-26, or this ~840Km flight in a PW5 are proof that the pilot is the biggest variable and not the glider. when i was younger i thought an 15 meter 750k thermal flight originating in upstate NY was pure fantasy, but dale kramer was damn near doing it. it amounted to taking off at 10 AM and flying until 6:00.

it's interesting to see what distances different gliders are being flown, i just doing think you'll get an accurate assessment. most people will go alot shorter than whats possible, but with the right person you'd be surprised how far it IS possible to go. at contests (which account for many of the cross country flights posted to OLC) the full soaring day isn't usually used.plenty of reason why the numbers won't be accurate.

i think there are too many variables to draw a reliable conclusion

That's the reason why GliderReview aggregates a few for each glider, including "fuzzy" ones like comments and editors' review.

i am also starting to think that you'd be
surprised how far a specific glider can be pushed

Well, that would be related to *maximum* distance, not to *average* distance.

Thanks ND for your feedback.
Ciao

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Jacopo

On Wednesday, January 18, 2017 at 5:09:14 PM UTC+3, Jacopo Romei wrote:
i think there are too many variables to draw a reliable conclusion

That's the reason why GliderReview aggregates a few for each glider, including "fuzzy" ones like comments and editors' review.

i am also starting to think that you'd be
surprised how far a specific glider can be pushed

Well, that would be related to *maximum* distance, not to *average* distance.

Maximum can be an untypical outlier.

75th percentile, or 90th percentile would be interesting, assuming there are enough flights. (and the corresponding 25th or 10% percentile)