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Early season Sierra Wave flight
Reading about the ridge flight in Utah reminded me that I should post
some details of the wave flight that I had on the 23rd of Sept. I fly with the Sierra Soaring Club out of Inyokern CA. Friday I was scheduled to take a family friend for a ride. He is a 17 year old who is interested in flying fighters for the military someday. I left for the airport at around noon and the wind was just howling in the valley but once I got to the airport the wind was light and variable. I met up with the friend and his father and we started to preflight the Blanik L-23 and get it ready for flight. Our tow pilot takes the 182A towplane out for the warm-up flight and reports that he is flying through rotor. He lands and we get set up for the tow on runway 33. Normally we tow out from runway 20 but by this time the wind is aobut 15 knots blowing straight down 33. We launch and I found myself in probably the roughest air that I have experienced in a long time. Typical Sierra Wave rotor as I am told. We towed up into the mouth of the Indian Wells Canyon and at 4,400 feet above field elevation we released into the wave. I flew figure eights always turning into the wind and about 15 minutes later we were skirting along at 14,000 feet MSL. The challenge at this point was to stay under 14k. The Blanik we were flying is not equipped with an oxygen system, otherwise I think that we could have easilly rode the wave up to 18k. So we skirted along flying a racetrack pattern from Inyokern to Pearsonville. After our half hour at altitude was up I opened the divebreaks all the way and brought us below 12,500. Once again it was difficult to stay at this altitude and not climb. After about an hour and 45 minutes of wave flying I brought us back into the valley and we did some zero-g porposing and some lazy-8's to blead off altitude. My friend loved the minor acrobatics, one of these times we need to get him up in the ASK-21 and do some real acro. I landed the Blanik on the dirt runway parallel to runway 20 and we had a total of 2.2 hours flying. It was unexpected to find wave so early in the season. January through April is typically the best time of year for wave at Inyokern in my experience. So it was a great fun flight that I thought that I would share with everybody. Alex |
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Alex: Thanks for confirming what I suspected: Friday's wave extended well north and south along the eastern face of the Sierras. We had two wave flights out of Minden the same day, in strong winds. The first one took off about 12:30 and turned around at 18,000' because they only carried cannulas. I took off about 2:00 with a student, both of us carrying A-14 equipment so we could try to get up into higher wave in the Minden West Wave Window. We towed to about 8,200' (3,500' AGL) in some rough rotor, and had to sniff a little east and west until we could find the up side to work. We worked that to just a little less than 14,000', where we finally emerged into smooth lift that pegged the vario at 1,000 FPM. That was about two miles east of Heavenly, about over the sewer pond. I called down to the front desk and had them call Oakland Center to ask for Minden West, and they called back just a few minutes later to say Oakland Center had too much traffic in the area and had turned us down. By that time we were just over 17,000'. We put on full spoilers and picked the speed up and were able to hold at 18,000'. From that vantage point we could see good solid wave clouds as far as the eye could see both north and south. I think we could have made it 50 miles north very quickly, but with the southerly component I wasn't sure how we would fare coming back south. We finally turned to the south end of the Carson Valley and ran the face of the Sierras south of Gardnerville. It was slow progress because the wind speed was high enough that we had to hold a pretty big crab. I estimate the wind speed at 18,000' at more than 45 kts, but didn't have a GPS to confirm that. Clouds were filling in pretty fast by 3:00, so we crossed to the east of the valley and found the down side. Even then, we flew into the secondary as we were working our way home and could easily have climbed right on up again. My student is from Denmark and was happy to have experienced the Minden Wave. I'm just sorry we couldn't get the window open. Maybe next time. Fred |
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