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Fear of flying cross country
As usual, Bob does a great job of writing up a soaring issue. In this case
selecting landing fields. However, I would like to add something. It's what I would call "Pre-Selection" of fields in the months and weeks before a cross country flight. When doing this, I'm looking for an "A-List" of "known-safe" landable fields. These are fields that I have walked while assessing all hazards. Often these are airports where I may pace off the distance between edge lights to assure myself that the wingtip will clear. I also check for road access and cell phone reception. Many public airports don't make the "A-List". An "A-list" field has no hazards at all. On any road trip where I have the time, I'll make a list of interesting locations to look at. Any rural or private strip is on the list. I'll be particularly interested in 'gaps' between A-List fields. I note the Lat/Long and carry a GPS handheld to make finding the strip easier. I may have printed out a aerial photo of the field. If a private strip makes the "A-List", I'll contact the owner and explain my interest. These have always been pleasant encounters which, I hope, will make it easier if another pilot lands there. I also keep an eye out for roads and farm fields that I'll put on my "B-List". An example is a 2-mile stretch of gravel road in Colorado's San Luis Valley - I call it "Desperation Road". It has no fences, reflector posts or overhead wires and it's about 10" above grade with shallow bar ditches and 6" sage bush beyond that. Desperation Road, like all "B-List" fields, is landable but not without hazards. So far about 50% of the strips on turnpoint database lists are absolutely unlandable. About 20% of the strips on Sectionals no longer exist or are so decrepit that they are unlandable. Be careful with maps. Armed with my A-List and GPS navigation, I can always fly within gliding range of a safe field. That takes a lot of sweat out of cross country. Bill Daniels "Bob Whelan" wrote in message ... CindyASK wrote: On Jun 27, 10:19 pm, Marc Ramsey wrote: Jack wrote: Marc Ramsey wrote: At our club we had a requirement to land over a barrier, then get stopped within 500' prior to taking the 1-26 XC. A reasonable test, if properly organized, but not something to do on a day to day basis. Why not? Because I've seen what happens when a newbie misjudges the distance it will take to stop, and touches down a bit too late. This may be all well and good if one has a large grass field, Wow. This is the nicest thread, with the nicest people and contributions I have seen on ras in quite a while. Bravo guys, and I will pitch in a little also. There is a difference in land out and land - away - from - home. A lot of the mental wigglies, and background peer noise can go away, if you are willing to make and live with above-glide-slope discipline to known airports (or aeroretrievable places depending on your region of the country). Airport sized places reduce risk, and social complications. Get an air tow home. For 50km flights, it may be cheaper than the friends dinner's and trailer and gas time. My first XC flights were in 1-26s (not even mine), and my current XC flights are also mostly not in my own airframes. (Thank you to many folks.) I want to take extremely good care of the glider(s). I have many land aways. I have few landouts, as those are very risky to gliders in CA/NV territories. All my landouts have been on places I have walked with my sneakers before I flew there. (This might affect my access to pretty airframes?) Do I stretch things? Not beyond glide discipline with adjustment for wind and margin for inefficiency for me and that day's glider. In 30 years, I've only been seriously challenged on margin twice, and I go places a bunch, usually in a twin with a student. I teach that you need to S.S.T.O.P.P. soaring and plan a good landing from a reasonable distance above a known landing spot. Size(span) - how many lanes of traffic wide do you need? 1-26 about four lanes, 15Mtr six lanes. Size(length) - how many times long is it versus its width? That will get you a pretty good handle on sizes. Slope - is there any? Prioritize uphill versus upwind for that landing. Texture - airport textures are good. Fields - color, pattern, shadows tell us more info. You may have to pick with furrows over into wind or slope. Obstacles - as you make two or three complete circles around this place..... you have the opportunity to observe drift, and be on differing radials for lighting changes on fences, wires, trees, furrows, etc. Point into Wind if you can. Positive Points - think happy things about this place now that you have inspected it well and have a nice Place Picked to Touch, and to Halt. The others told you, you need to know course and landable spots before you leave home. XC dual is always a good thing. Fly a route in an airplane, and take the edge off, or practice field evals from the plane, and go compare data from the ground after that route flight. You need to be able to land accurately, always. This means knowing your factors for adjustment of flare distance and taxi distance. (Which a Approach Speed, Approach Configuration (%spoilers), headwind component, slope, texture and braking ability of the machine.) Yes, spot land the heck out of every landing. Pick your flaring place, know your distance in flare to a touch spot, and know your braking distance for your touchdown attitude and configuration. And for Mark and all of us, yeah, don't scare or threaten the home 'drome gnomes while you do this practice. When you know you are in command of landings, and have a tug pilot ready for a breather away from local duty, and have a decent day and your composure, leaving won't be so bad. You'll have a great story to tell us in July. Fly safely, Cindy B Congrats on being sufficiently motivated to ask your original question, and for having the gumption to do it. (Hmmm...methinks that sort of goes for the very act of soaring, too!) As you know by now, a person really CAN obtain useful information related to actual soaring on RAS! My most general feedback is: "What everyone else has already said." The only off-field-landing damage I've done (so far) was to dirt-clod-poke-a-hole in my 1-26's fabric adjacent the skid on my 3rd-ever off-field landing. It came from choosing a nice, chocolatey-brown, plowed field to land in. Key word 'plowed.' As in it hadn't been disced or harrowed or raked or otherwise further tended to. On short final it dawned on me the biggest clod in the field was about to arrive. 1-26's safely let you make such beginner mistakes at minimal cost and personal risk. I'm probably dumber than Cindy, and have used a shorter pre-off-field-landing checklist for decades. It's S*O*A*R. S - Surface O - Obstructions A - Approach R - Rectangle If you implement each of these checks/actions sequentially and in an un-rushed fashion, your OFL should be no less sweaty-palmed than a routine landing at your home field. (Of course, your palms WILL sweat more, but they won't *need* to! :-) ) SURFACE - I prioritize my OFL choices into 3 groups. Priority 1 fields are those with *known* smooth, low-risk, essentially level surfaces, of sufficient width for my wings and length for my rollout. Essentially, these are recently harrowed agricultural fields, whose furrows are not a factor in landing direction. Priority 2 fields are everything not Priority 1 or Priority 3. You'll note this includes airports, incidentally, as many have hungry lights lusting for glider wingtips. (So I'm a cautious soaring coward. It bothers me not one bit.) Priority 2 fields are the ones I work really, REALLY hard in assessing, as they're the ones with the most unknowns I have to identify and assess before willingly risking my ship by landing on them. Priority 3 fields are those any horizontal arrival may likely result in considerable damage to plane and possibly self. They're 'no-brainers' for me. I simply won't land on them, and give them no further thought or attention once identifying and discarding them. Western prairie, for example. Scary stuff IMHO..but not every pilot of retractable glass i know agrees with me. Point is, YOU get to identify and set the risk parameters within which you're willing to soar. Better, IMHO, to be an OFL wimp than kicking yourself over a busted gear or tailboom from that yucca you didn't notice, or the prairie dog hole/mound, or some soil-encrusted rock that did its worst. Books can be - and have been - written about how to assess and choose field surfaces. Attempting conciseness on RAS is probably futile, so I won't try. But if you choose a poor surface, and still implement the rest of your checks perfectly, you run the risk of breaking the glider, so surface analysis is crucial to any XC soaring pilot, regardless of skill level or L/D. OBSTRUCTIONS - As used in this checklist these are anything sticking up from my chosen field, OR, things not there (as in dirt-free-zones of critter holes). If you've chosen a good surface, identified any/all potential obstructions and worked backward to identify the pattern required to get you onto your field while avoiding the obstructions, the next thing (still working backwards) is... APPROACH - Here you're looking for "airborne gotchas!" NOT directly on your field, e.g. bordering fences/trees/powerlines, hillocks, etc. The "gotchas" aren't generally airborne, but if you are when one gets you, it won't be pretty. This is an area I've found many beginners don't genuinely appreciate. A starting/useful rule-of-thumb is you need to multiply your necessary field length by 10 times the height of any "gotcha." So that nice, comfy, 1,000' long disced field you're eyeballing, suddenly becomes 50% shorter because of those 50' trees surrounding it. Aren't you happy you're flying a 1-26, now? RECTANGLE - Make every OFL pattern a full rectangle, for only by so doing can you with (nearly 100%) certainty identify wind strength and direction. (You DO want to land into the wind, don't you?) Also, it gives you the best perspective(s) of your selected field you can get short of walking it beforehand. Two final things to ponder. One - though you'll probably want to have successfully completed your "SOA" assessments by 'some comfortable altitude' (in my case several thousand feet, wry chuckle), human eyeballs are incapable of so doing. What you'll conclude only through direct experience is you can (generally) accurately conclude the "S" part by the time you're down to ~2k agl, the smaller "O" bits won't be satisfactorily identifiable until the 1k-2k agl level, and you might in fact be assessing them still on short final...depending... The "A" bits are (for me, anyway) generally easy to assess, while still well above crosswind height. But you've gotta be *checking* for them, or bad things can easily happen... The general point is, if you do your worrying, fretting, assessing, and decision-making above pattern height, by the time you're in the pattern, you can relax and be reasonably certain you're about to make as no-sweat a landing as you're used to making on your home airport. Two - Paradoxically, THE most difficult time of day to assess fields from aloft is when the soaring is likely to be best, i.e. when the sun is high overhead. Why? Little help from shadows in assessing things like field slopes, plant/obstruction heights, etc. So, delaying your landing until as late as possible has a whole host of benefits. Yee hah! In closing, if you can't consistently fly approaches to a pre-selected landing 'spot' you need to lengthen your field choices accordingly. IMHO, it's much more important to be able to fly a well coordinated and speed-consistent pattern than it is to be able to arrive 'at a spot.' The idea is to arrive horizontally at some pre-selected speed (i.e. energy level), above a Priority One surface, heading upwind. Everything else is secondary. Once you've attained consistency IN the pattern, 'the spot' eventually falls out in the wash. Most of all...have FUN!!! Regards, Bob - wimpy - W. |
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