Since becoming the Junior leader at our soaring club, I've been awfully busy with that and other soaring things.
I've been building a photorealistic scenery for Harris Hill. It's been a real slog to figure it all out but I'm making progress. I stupidly decided that it was such a hassle to make a scenery that I'd investigate new tools and techniques. THAT has been a real rabbit hole! But I'm making progress. One of these days I'll post something on that.
Probably the most significant thing I've done is to try and help my club solve the problem of lots of students and few instructors. We're like any other club and the enthusiasm waxes and wanes from time to time. We've gotten behind a bit on nudging people to become instructors and we've also had a number of tow pilots quit. That's a problem because most of our instructors know how to fly the towplane. That means they are flying when they could be instructing.
We have 39 people in the club who don't have a license. We have 11 instructors. Do the math.
As the Junior advisor, I know that the 19 teens we have in the club have a hard time getting instruction, so I finally got to propose that we use Condor, a soaring flight simulator to instruct students. Our leadership was receptive, but properly skeptical so we agreed to hold a single test session to see whether it could work or not.
We are very fortunate to have access to the National Soaring Museum (NSM) on Harris Hill. The NSM has a suite of 5 simulators that run Condor, so we had 2 of our Senior members and 2 of our Junior members attend a simulation instruction session.
The results were good, I think. We had four students fly for 90 minutes under an instructor's guidance. I helped out as well, as I think I might be bound for CFI-ville at some point. That's 4 X 90 or 360 minutes of flight time! In just 90 minutes. With a single instructor. At 12 minutes per flight, that is 30 flights. At $40 per flight, that was $1,200 dollars of flight time, for free.
We practiced the basics - pitch trim and airspeed in level flight, and shallow turns and then steep turns. The sim allows you to stop, illustrate a point, go outside, turn on smoke, explain how to trace a nice clean spiral, pause to talk about it, and then resume the flight. You can replay the flight and view it from any perspective.
How good is it? Good enough to make progress, I'd say. The glider we use is an ASK-13, and it flies a lot like our Schweizer 2-33. The flight physics are pretty good and the adverse yaw and rudder coordination is like the real thing. You can fly most any maneuver and you don't need to wait for a tow plane. Hit the 'Q' key to gain 1,000 feet of altitude in an instant.
Can you actually learn to fly a glider in it? I think so. I wouldn't try it, of course. But I think that if you can fly the simulator, you can easily transition to a glider. Plus, you can try out all of those things you've always wanted to know - how far will it glide? Does this thing spin? How much altitude can I slip off and still make the runway? You can practice rope breaks, find out why cross controlled stalls are a bad thing, and so on.
I'm hoping we'll adopt this training technique more heavily this year and maybe even do a weekly flight simulation training session with it for our students. Over the winter, I think we can do even more.
If it knocks even 5 flights off of the average solo requirement, it will be totally worth it.
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