Great vid Nik, makes me laugh as my two biggest weaknesses are flying solo and not topping up on every opportunity to cloud base. I was probably over the top yesterday and collecting every foot all the time. I also laughed as I had several layers on and was really cold at base, took me 20 mins to realise I had not zipped anything up from take off as the climb was pretty full on. Fantastic looking at the flight from another pilots perspective.
Q: what happens when you get to base and start being pulled in by cloud suck. As a sailplane pilot in a heavy aircraft its nose down and accelerate away. Under your wing where I assume you can’t so easily do that what can you do??
Pull what we call ‘big ears’ where we pull in the sides of the wing to create less surface area for lift. Also apply speed bar while you are doing this which together with big ears adds to your descent. Failing that there are various things, such as spiral dives, b line stalls and such. All part of the learning curve.
Yup, we can deform the wing by making it smaller, called big ears to increase sink plus applying speed bar to push faster away from cloud. Or we can spiral dive or stall the wing. The trick is to push to the edge of the cloud early, then we can dip in and out to top up. Hopefully these days Flarm will also help flag us up to Sailplanes.
Appreciate the response. I was watching a video of a hang glider pilot in tandem get pulled in and it seemed there was nothing for him to do. He climbed through the control bar to get into a severe nose down attitude and then spent over an hour trying to get out. Sounds like you guys have better options.
