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AIRTHUG
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Location: Point of the Mountain, Draper, UT
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 Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:48 am Post subject: XC #2, another personal best! |
 #1 |
Here was the first one for a little background in case you missed it: http://www.hanggliding.org/viewtopic.php?t=26158
Yesterday, Sunday 6/3 my friend Nile and I decided to give one of the better local XC sites a go (Heber). The forecast looked pretty good, with some instability- but not too much that it would OD like it did on Sat. The high temp was also a bit higher than Sat, showing lots of heating would be taking place. Forecast winds were SW-ish all day, at very reasonable velocities...
We got up there early, got set up, and were timing the cycles. They were close together, but didn't feel very strong. We launched around 12:45 and had to scratch A LOT to get up. I went first and was able to fight to stay a few hundred above launch. Nile launched and bounced up and down a bit before getting low and heading for the LZ.... where he made one of the best low saves I have ever seen. Not that he was THAT low... but given the conditions, and the layout of this site, and how FAST he climbed up to 12k, it was awesome!!!
We went over the back but poor communication (mostly on my part) got us separated- he went more East and I went more North. We tried to reconnect but it didn't work out. He found himself in an area with no lift, and landed. I have no doubt if there WAS lift, he would have found it and climbed out of there...
I pretty much blindly stumbled onto the only cloudstreet for 30 mi, and followed it ENE. Climbs all day were kind of rough, broken... it felt like a really high pressure day, even though it wasn't?! Weird...
Cloudbase, and the highest I got, was just above 15.5k. I only made it up there once (well, I only took the time to try once... most of the time I was climbing "enough" and moving on).
As I got into WY the winds picked up- the 6030 was showing 20-25 mph tailwind... and I wasn't that high at that point. Thermals were even weaker, and with the high winds they were really broken. I drifted downwind in some 0 for a few miles before eventually landing in a very large, open area.
Landing conditions were windy/gusty, but the big flat field was managable enough. I landed way in the middle, and took the long walk to the road.
It was fun... but a lot of work! I'd really like to go XC on a "good day" next time! 
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Ryan Voight
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CAL
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Joined: 05 Mar 2009
Posts: 3455
Location: OGDEN, UT
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 8:56 am Post subject: |
#2 |
like i said look out comp pilots ! i can't open your files on my computer
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andylongvq
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Joined: 24 May 2011
Posts: 466
Location: California
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:05 am Post subject: |
#3 |
Nice job Ryan!
One of the great things about SeeYou... or any other program where you can see a summary of your XC flight parameters... is that you can spend time pondering your flight and see where you were doing well and covering ground, where you were slow, decisions that painted you into a corner (and slowed you down), etc.
Below is some of the summary statistics from Ryan's flight.
Here's some things I noticed.
- Looks like Ryan and Nile spent about 45 minutes near launch before they could get away. If you take this time out from Ryan's total flight time, his average speed over the ground for the flight was approximately 22 mph. Give or take.
This is an area that's always a challenge. That is, being able to launch as early as possible but also being able to get away and get on course as soon as possible. Sometimes it's just that the day hasn't turned on yet. And sometimes it's site specific, ie, what's immediately downwind precludes getting away early because you have to get fairly high in order to bail over the back.
- Looks like Ryan likes to climb, or more likely climbs better/tracks lift better, turning left as 76% of the time on this flight he's thermalling to the left. I'm the same way... only I climb and track and drift in light lift to zero better when I'm turning to the right.
Here's some other stats to ponder.
- He spent 55% of this time circling and 45% of his time flying straight.
- His glides seemed short, only 2.5 miles long. But this is because of all the time he spent around launch. With a pen and paper, you could write down what the distances of his actual XC glides were and average them.
When watching his track log and glider icon in SeeYou, each time he goes on glide, the length of the glide is shown on the bottom toolbar. That's where you can get the glides between thermals during the actual XC portion of the flight, add them up and average them.
- His Mean L/D was quite good. 18.9. This is likely a combination of the tailwind, which was quite strong towards the end of this flight and the amount of time he was flying through a rising air mass... something that his Netto vario would show.
Anyway, there's a lot to be learned from watching XC flights on SeeYou and looking at the summary of your stats.
Another cool thing to do is get all the IGC files from the pilots who flew the XC flight, load them together on SeeYou and watch everyone fly together. That's where you can see where the good and poor decisions were made, why a certain pilot bombed out, etc.
Would be interesting to get a hold of Nile's IGC file and run SeeYou with both of you guys flying.
Again, well done Ryan! Your drifting along in zero sink towards the end of your flight reminds me of the tail end of my long flight from Mount Diablo last spring.
By the way, for all you aspiring XC pilots out there, being able to drift along in the wind in zero sink like Ryan does so well is a very valuable tool to have in your XC toolbox.
That's because you can use this technique to drift yourself from poor thermal producing terrain into good thermal producing terrain where you can then find a much more powerful climb, get back up high again then put the hammer down and get your XC speed back up. The speed that you lost when you were having to drift along in survival mode while the wind blew you into better thermal producing terrain.
- Andy
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ChattaroyMan
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Joined: 01 Nov 2009
Posts: 1793
Location: Chattaroy, WA -USA
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:59 am Post subject: |
#4 |
Nice flight Ryan! And thanks for the great breakdown Andy! I wanna do some XC this summer so I'm all ears. Any help/advice on the thinking end of the game I'm doing my best to absorb/internalize. Did some limited XC in the past and learned the hard way to stay with 0 to little lift. Both times I left that I got drilled.
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andylongvq
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Joined: 24 May 2011
Posts: 466
Location: California
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 1:38 pm Post subject: |
#5 |
| ChattaroyMan wrote: |
| I wanna do some XC this summer so I'm all ears. Any help/advice on the thinking end of the game I'm doing my best to absorb/internalize. |
The first thing I'd need to know before I would offer some tips is where you are right now in terms of total hours, hours of pure thermalling (no ridge lift) as well as what you believe is your biggest limitation in terms of technique/skill.
However, this is Ryan's 80 miler thread. So perhaps you could start another thread, give us an idea of where you are, what you've done so far, ie, give us your baseline. What you're struggling with, what you want to be able to do and us old birds can chim in and add our 2 cents.
In fact, that would be a cool trend to start on this forum. Sort of a, "I want to improve my XC" pilot of the week thing.
And you can always PM me if you got anything specific you want to ask. But I will say that if you've got Mike (Wonderboy) in your area, he would be an excellent resource.
One thing you'll notice about Mike in his videos is he very often thermals quite banked up. So, working on doing that will pay dividends. When you're banked up, you'll climb faster most of the time, you'll climb out from down low more often (the thermals are smaller diameter down low) and banking steep allows you to track where the lift is going better.
That's because when you are banked up high, you're closer to the core. The closer you are to the core, the more texture you will feel. And the more texture you feel, the better you'll be able to feel various "marker buoys" in the thermal, keep track of them, and follow where they are going.
Anyway, back to Ryan's excellent flight! 
- Andy
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NMERider
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Joined: 07 Apr 2008
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 3:01 pm Post subject: |
#6 |
Looks like fun! 
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pjwings
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Joined: 20 Aug 2009
Posts: 1995
Location: Tennessee
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:01 pm Post subject: |
#7 |
Sweet flight man! You seem to be tearing it up now that you've set your mind to doing XC. Two flights and two personal bests.... not bad!
However, I'm afraid without some kind of narrated video it's just not the same. 
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AIRTHUG
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Location: Point of the Mountain, Draper, UT
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:04 pm Post subject: |
#8 |
Thanks for the analysis Andy! You're right, it seems very informative!
I can add a little to fill in some blanks...
| andylongvq wrote: |
- Looks like Ryan and Nile spent about 45 minutes near launch before they could get away. |
Because our plan was to go together, it took some doing for us BOTH to be high at the same time. You can see I boated around and even left a few climbs, I was trying to stay within 1000 vert ft of Nile so I could help out.
As for getting away, he's flying a U2, so we wanted to be extra high just to be safe. I probably could have gone way earlier... but our plan was to go together. I still think we could have gone farther-faster if we were able to get out of there together.
| andylongvq wrote: |
If you take this time out from Ryan's total flight time, his average speed over the ground for the flight was approximately 22 mph. Give or take. |
At this point in my XC flying, I am quite happy with that 
| andylongvq wrote: |
| - Looks like Ryan likes to climb, or more likely climbs better/tracks lift better, turning left as 76% of the time on this flight he's thermalling to the left. I'm the same way... only I climb and track and drift in light lift to zero better when I'm turning to the right. |
Yes and no... my glider has a slight right turn in it. It's slight enough that I didn't want to tune for it because I thought it might have been a one-day thing (I noticed it on my last XC), but it was there again on this flight. I feel it most on long, straight, fast glides.... but also when thermalling. Turning left the glider was coordinating great- I could actually thermal with a touch more VG because the turn helped reduce the requisite high-siding.
So, yes, I was climbing better to the left. But not so much by personal preference
| andylongvq wrote: |
- He spent 55% of this time circling and 45% of his time flying straight.
- His glides seemed short, only 2.5 miles long. But this is because of all the time he spent around launch. With a pen and paper, you could write down what the distances of his actual XC glides were and average them. |
This was a conscious choice based on the conditions of the day. None of the thermals were very well formed, and climbing for a complete 360 was rare... but the lift was definitely stronger up high than it was down low. So I stayed high as much as possible. This meant short glides to clouds or places I thought lift might be, and then climbing again when I got there. Maybe could have gone further if I stretched the glides a bit more.... maybe could have gotten stuck grovelling low, or even decked it. Who knows.... but regardless, it was a conscious decision.
| andylongvq wrote: |
| - His Mean L/D was quite good. 18.9. This is likely a combination of the tailwind, which was quite strong towards the end of this flight and the amount of time he was flying through a rising air mass... something that his Netto vario would show. |
My T2C and Covert have been serving me well 
| andylongvq wrote: |
By the way, for all you aspiring XC pilots out there, being able to drift along in the wind in zero sink like Ryan does so well is a very valuable tool to have in your XC toolbox. |
Agreed! This case was a bit easier because I was drifting over large, open fields... so I didn't have to worry about where I was headed too much.
On that topic- I'd like to make a point of pointing out  that I was able to fly 80 miles without flying in overly risky conditions, or putting myself where I had no good landing options. I'm pretty sure I had a large, green flat field at a 3:1 or 4:1 for the entire flight.
I'd urge other aspiring pilots to follow the same margins of safety. Don't believe what some of the big-time XC people might say about HAVING to take big risks to have big flights. Granted, 80 miles is a long way from big... but it wasn't that good a day, and I'm new to this...
Thanks everyone for the feedback and support. Aside from the huge inconvenience that is XC... I'm having tons of fun! I'm pretty sure I've missed several beers with my name on them in the regular LZ's already though 
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Ryan Voight
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AIRTHUG
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:06 pm Post subject: |
#9 |
| pjwings wrote: |
However, I'm afraid without some kind of narrated video it's just not the same. |
I'm following my own advice I give to others... when doing something new, especially something that can be quite risky if you're not careful, leave the camera at home and just focus on the flying!
I would love to have some photos or video from these flights... but I think it's good advice to follow, too.
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Ryan Voight
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NMERider
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Joined: 07 Apr 2008
Posts: 7363
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:15 pm Post subject: |
#10 |
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
| ....I'd urge other aspiring pilots to follow the same margins of safety. Don't believe what some of the big-time XC people might say about HAVING to take big risks to have big flights. Granted, 80 miles is a long way from big... but it wasn't that good a day, and I'm new to this... |
There are much better places to go X/C than Southern California, which in my opinion this is one of the worst places in the US to fly X/C. Unfortunately, travel for flying can be expensive as well as time consuming and quickly becomes a luxury. So, there are a few intrepid souls who have found ways to exploit the local potential but it's not without the risk of landing in some unusual places. The benefits are we have a lot of local options and year-round flying including our limited X/C.
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NMERider
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Joined: 07 Apr 2008
Posts: 7363
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 5:19 pm Post subject: |
#11 |
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
| pjwings wrote: |
| ...However, I'm afraid without some kind of narrated video it's just not the same. |
....I'm following my own advice I give to others... |
Welcome to the busted chops club!
I fly a lot better with no camera or voice recorder anywhere on my glider. Just knowing it's there is a big distraction. I've already made more than enough narrated X/C videos and never even finished the edit of my first 50-miler from early 2009!
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andylongvq
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Joined: 24 May 2011
Posts: 466
Location: California
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 6:17 pm Post subject: |
#12 |
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
Because our plan was to go together, it took some doing for us BOTH to be high at the same time. You can see I boated around and even left a few climbs, I was trying to stay within 1000 vert ft of Nile so I could help out.
As for getting away, he's flying a U2, so we wanted to be extra high just to be safe. I probably could have gone way earlier... but our plan was to go together. I still think we could have gone farther-faster if we were able to get out of there together. |
That's cool that you were doing this. It is indeed pretty hard to leave together. But as you point out, it's incredibly fun to fly XC together. Nice that you were willing to wait for Nile.
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
| At this point in my XC flying, I am quite happy with that (22 mph average) |
Just so you know, my pointing out this average wasn't a disparaging comment. On the contrary. It was to show that a lot of XC flying is simply looking at the math.
For those aspiring XC pilots who read about Ryan's flight, it brings the possibilities closer when you can say to yourself, "Ok, so that means if I can average 15-20 mph over the ground... and I am able to keep it in the air for 2 hours, there's a 30-40 mile flight. Hey, I can do that!"
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
| This was a conscious choice based on the conditions of the day (short glides). None of the thermals were very well formed, and climbing for a complete 360 was rare... but the lift was definitely stronger up high than it was down low. So I stayed high as much as possible. This meant short glides to clouds or places I thought lift might be, and then climbing again when I got there. |
Got it. What I meant was the glides seemed short but in reality probably were not because of the time you spent around launch waiting for Nile and SeeYou counts what you are doing between climbs near launch as "glides". So if a pilot wants to know what your real glide distances were, there's a way to figure that out in SeeYou. In fact, I think I remember at least one of your glides was over 15 miles.
Again, for aspiring XC pilots, Ryan was smart to stay high, up in the wind and fly by the clouds. You've always got way more options when you make the conscious decision to stay high when the lift is difficult.
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
On that topic- I'd like to make a point of pointing out that I was able to fly 80 miles without flying in overly risky conditions, or putting myself where I had no good landing options. I'm pretty sure I had a large, green flat field at a 3:1 or 4:1 for the entire flight.
I'd urge other aspiring pilots to follow the same margins of safety. Don't believe what some of the big-time XC people might say about HAVING to take big risks to have big flights. |
A great big amen to that one. Also a good example of leading by example. After all, flying XC is supposed to be FUN!
So what's next Ryan... 125 miles on a fair day?
- Andy
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AIRTHUG
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Wonder Boy
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Posts: 1269
Location: Spokane WA
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:00 pm Post subject: |
#14 |
If you are a pilot lacking skills like myself & you want to improve your XC...... get an Atos!
I still suck but man will that thing stay up on its own. (Makes me look good... ok better anyways)
Mike 
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NMERider
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2012 10:04 pm Post subject: |
#15 |
I'm starting a betting pool on the date that Ryan announces his first X/C clinic. Any takers? 
Or perhaps a poll would get more action than a pool.
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AIRTHUG
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Location: Point of the Mountain, Draper, UT
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| Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2012 6:34 am Post subject: |
#16 |
| NMERider wrote: |
| I'm starting a betting pool on the date that Ryan announces his first X/C clinic. Any takers? |
Even I'm not arrogant enough to think I could teach an XC clinic after 2 good flights
I could teach the basics fine... maybe an INTRO to XC kind of thing... but I like a lot more experience under my belt before I try to teach others... Aerobatics for example, I've been practicing and studying as long as I've been flying, and I only just started teaching others the last few years
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Ryan Voight
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NMERider
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| Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2012 7:42 am Post subject: |
#17 |
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
| NMERider wrote: |
| I'm starting a betting pool...... |
Even I'm not arrogant enough to think I could teach an XC clinic after 2 good flights .... |
But seriously, how about staring bailout landing clinics?
When Ken Andrews organized the Sylmar Falcon league a few years back, one of the main thrusts was to walk at least 4 new bailouts each morning before the league began. Often the goal would be to fly a task then land in a designated bailout. While we were a bailout different pilots were asked to describe how they would set it up from the air. Sadly this did not continue and now we have pilots breaking bones when it was avoidable.
It's wonderful to have mountain ranges surrounded by nice fields but my expereince has shown me the sky will flush gliders out like rain drops on even the most perfect looking days.
Your first post mentions landing in the middle of a field due to conditions. I wish this thread focused more on that topic but nobody is asking you about your decision making process when you set up that landing.
I might even be persuaded one day to compile a video of bad XC landings with an explanation on what I did wrong then and how I'd do it differently now. Maybe.
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Windlord
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| Posted: Tue Jun 05, 2012 7:58 am Post subject: |
#18 |
Very nice Ryan. Look forward to further reports of longer accomplishments.
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CAL
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Location: OGDEN, UT
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| Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2012 5:02 am Post subject: |
#19 |
| AIRTHUG wrote: |
| NMERider wrote: |
| I'm starting a betting pool on the date that Ryan announces his first X/C clinic. Any takers? |
Even I'm not arrogant enough to think I could teach an XC clinic after 2 good flights
I could teach the basics fine... maybe an INTRO to XC kind of thing... but I like a lot more experience under my belt before I try to teach others... Aerobatics for example, I've been practicing and studying as long as I've been flying, and I only just started teaching others the last few years |
Ryan, NME and Sky Shaddow should team up, be the best XC Clinic ever, you would have to divide up the time so you all have the same amount of time to present you knowledge, Ryan likes to ask questions to see what pilots already know and allow them a chance to share knowledge, with that you get even more of a knowledge base and makes it fun
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