Another great video! I appreciate your running commentary while making decisions. I find that very helpful as I look at what is ahead of you, and make choices similar to the decisions you make. It’s great preparation for my first cross country flight this spring. Thanks!
First off, I filled with envy because it summer time in right now in NZ and it's cold and snowy where I'm am at 43 degrees north Lat. And you are gliding. Much appreciate the ongoing commentary on your decision to find lift, and avoid clouds that were overdeveloping or overdeveloped. The 6 knots, (607 feet per/min lift) over the ocean was a special event of warm air rising over colder ocean air. A few miles out past the shoreline there many pure sink? Your day and altitude remind me of a typical day at York Soaring, NW of Toronto, Canada but without the hilly terrain when I flew there many years ago. May/early June at that latitude north in early spring can see the occasional 600 ft/min lift and our altitude is the same range as yours 1200 to 4500 feet AGL. The most lift I've experienced is 1400 per min in a Grob103 at Minden, NV years ago - and it was sustained - bank the glider in tight in the thermal, or you get spat out by the thermal. I was with an instructor, and we stopped climbing at 12,500ft ASL, / 8,000 ft AGL. Wonderful day. Keep up the instruction. Much admire your airmanship from afar.
What a terrific flight and video! I very much enjoyed it. I love your commentary, Tim. You reminded me of a flight I took recently in our club DG1000 with a very experienced long time pilot and club member - "Just give me zero sink", he kept saying! He told me a story of staying up for over two hours in zero sink. Of course, he stayed close to the airport, but still. Pretty cool! Thanks again!
Very interesting video! Reminds me of the day where I was stuck at the coast and scratched the airspace 😅 Do you really say overdevelopments to these spread out clouds with a significant inversion on top? My understanding was that overdevelopments are vertically powerful clouds but I´m absolutely not a meteorologist. Congrats on winning!
no idea re clouds, I'm just a guy on youtube! you're probably right, overdevelopment should be big build ups that get too big and spread out. This was probably not quite that. Who knows :) Yeah it was similar to your ocean going adventures day, I remember that day well but not as much as you do haha
@@PureGlide You're a great deal more than "just a guy on RU-vid". I find your videos fascinating. So much so that I am going to try and organize a few flights as a passenger ( possibly a student pilot later on. Is there an age limit to be allowed to be a solo pilot? )
yeah good flight and great scenery and those birds so cool, I remember a convergence over Ardmore when I was learning, the sky for miles was full of seagulls! and speaking of low finishes, I remember Lindsay Stephens brushing the grass with his wing tip doing those comp finishes, spectacular stuff in the "good old days"
Great flying and great video as usual, Tim! I see that your vario reads the speed you're actually climbing up while thermaling, that being by Knots, whereas we hang gliders as well as paragliders in Italy/Europe use vario readings by meter per second climb&descent-rate. I hear in the US both hang gliders and paragliders go by feet per minute. Since engineless flying is all about altitude gain or loss,, out of curiosity I'd like to know what you think about this vario-rate reading versus yours. Certainly the system a pilot is accustomed to is the one that fits better, however getting meter/feet per second climb-rate do you think might give you an instant value of the type of thermal you're in or the type of downdraft you're encountering in relation to the altitude you're gaining or losing? Cheers! 🙂
Hi yeah we get very used to it, and use knots for both vertical speed and air speed. m/s is almost exactly half knots, so it’s easy to work out if you need it. Eg 3 knots is about 1.5m/s
Geee, I'm all in for aviation but Gliding is something I have huge respect for. I wouldn't dare even to try it. I live in Austria we have many gliders since it seems to be very popular. It isn't rare to see several glider around Innsbruck as example.
So nice to see a good soaring video coming out. In Colorado, we're looking at a foot of snow with more to come tomorrow night. Sigh. Would love to visit Kiwi country again someday. Our airstrips don't have sheep on them, but occasionally horses and deer.
Try flying in the UK! Slithers of airspace the absolute norm in most of the country and 4,500’ base the absolute norm on a good day! Keep up the good work and Happy New Year to you.
That Libelle launching at 1:24 had wing tips. Does anybody know if they help with the problem of a wing dropping at the start of an aerotow ? Our Club Libelle does this sometimes, and no amount of opposite stick can recover it, so we release. Just wondering if the tips help.
Great flight for the overdevelopment and altitudes you were achieving. There is one thing that I do that I think I noticed a couple times during that recording. When I’m getting low and stressed, and I hit some lift or indications of lift, I start to turn too early and It quits in the first 180° of the turn. That means I turned the wrong way or too early. Hopefully it means that the thermal is in front of you when you get around the 360° turn, but most of the time it doesn’t seem to be that way. Did you have any water ballast on that flight?
