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.

On Jun 27, 3:08 pm, 126Driver wrote:
I would like to fly more cross country flights but have to admit I
usually come up with a list of excuses for not going on any particular
day. The weather is never good enough, or I have a dinner engagement,
or my battery seems low, or something. Some of this is a general
concern about personal injury, but I think I am also just afraid of
landing out and having to put up with the inconvenience of a retrieve
and getting criticism from other pilots in my club. (I did some damage
to my glider on a land out last year and I have lost a lot of
confidence.) I thought I would get over this, but have not so far.
Has anybody else been through a period like this, and if so, how did
you work it out?

thanks,

Steve

Reading through the other replies, I think I could add one more thing
for you to think about. If you know of a local pilot who flies
contests, offer to crew for them at a regional meet. You will have a
great time and can talk to a lot of other XC pilots. Also, any XC
pilot worth his/her salt will greatly welcome the offer, and will
probably return the favor by helping you get going again. Then maybe
set a goal of flying in a regional contest in Sports Class, somewhere
with a very benign task area.

TA

Ian wrote:
On 28 Jun, 16:11, Mike the Strike wrote:
Finally, try to avoid routes which go over, or very near airfields.
It's OK and reassuring to pass within gliding range from time to time,
but runways suck gliders towards them. Well known fact.

You obviously haven't flown much in the US southwest. Over much of our
terrain, you can either land at an airfield or crash into cactus or
tree-strewn mountains. Landable strips are an essential part of our
database.

In such places it is obviously sensible to keep landing places in
mind, but I still think it's a mistake to fly directly over them.
There is a strange magnetic attraction at work ...

It also annoys the skydivers...

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA
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