When I arrived, you could tell it was a good soaring day. All the private aircraft trailers were out and some of them had already taken off. The three ASK-21's that the club owns were occupied. In addition, the 1-34 was queued up for takeoff. I decided to make myself useful and help out a bit while I waited to see if one of the ASK-21's would come available.
After about two hours, I decided it wasn't going to happen, but the weather was so magnificent I wasn't going to let a lack of high performance aircraft keep me on the ground. I preflighted one of the Schweizer 2-33's and decided I would test my skills in the trainer.
Just a minute or two before I got ready to pull it out on the line, the 1-34 returned and I zipped over to claim the next flight. Quite a bit of time passed as we had one maintenance issue after another with BOTH of our Pawnee tow planes and our Super Cub. Amazingly, I was finally airborne after 3:00pm.
I was back just a few minutes later, having found the sink but not the lift. I re-studied the sky and strapped myself back in to the 1-34. This time, I decided to release the tow line as we entered what appeared to be a very good thermal. I was about 300 feet below regular tow release height but in a matter of a minute or so I was climbing through 4,000 feet.
I stuck with the thermal until it petered out around 5,000 feet and headed towards Elmira. All I found was sink, so I turned back to the ridge over Harris Hill and decided to fly back and forth along it until I found a thermal. The winds were still pretty good at around 10 knots out of the Northwest and I was able to reduce my descent and gain some time. After a few minutes, I stumbled into a 2 knot thermal and began to circle. As I did, it began to strengthen and I started up slowly.
I concentrated on maintaining airspeed and circling in a coordinated fashion. I'm still not great at it, but I am paying attention. It turns out I would get a lot of practice today. The 2 knot thermal turned into a 5 knot thermal and pretty soon I was climbing through 6,000 and then 7,000 feet, eventually topping out at 7,200.
I turned and headed out towards Elmira, since there were clouds in that direction and I reckoned that there might be thermals over the city. I found a difficult to fly one over the golf course and got myself back up to around 6,000 feet and then headed over towards the ELM airport. I found a great thermal there and circled some more.
The thermals were variable in height but fairly close together this day. I was able to move from one to another fairly easily but I never found one underneath a cumulus cloud - which is quite often where you find them. But the thermals were cycling so quick that by the time the clouds appeared, the thermal had died.
I flew left hand turns and right hand turns to try and get my skills up to par. Again, I'm no champ at this, but on the other hand I WAS managing to climb and stay high. I'm sure some of our 'Aces' could have climbed twice as high in half the time, but that's the allure of the gliding experience. You have to learn how through experience.
I headed back over the ridge off of Harris Hill and decided to work the lift there. Several hang gliders were quite high over the ridge, a sign that the lift is good enough for gliders. As I entered, I saw Rolf Beyer, one of our club members, enter below me. We flew the ridge together for awhile, but I decided to circle in some weak lift at the east end of the ridge. I worked it and worked it, in the lift sometimes climbing, sometimes not. But I stuck it out and the lift improved (or my technique did) and pretty soon I was in a 5 knot thermal headed up again!
Topping out at 5,000 feet, I headed back over the ridge and found super smooth lift both over the ridge and out over the valley. I was able to fly out, back, and cruise the ridge without losing altitude and regaining anything I lost from flying out of the lift band.
Eventually, I decided it was getting late and time to come down. I put the nose down, accelerated to 80 knots and did a series of ridge runs with pull ups and rudder turns at each end for fun. After several passes, I was low enough to land and brought the plane in.
I knew I'd been up for awhile but when I checked the log sheet, I realized I had a new personal best of 2 hours and 22 minutes! I think I would have stayed up longer if it hadn't been so late, but this was a great flight in and of itself. I'm really enjoying the flexibility of the 1-34 and being able to range a little further out to find those thermals I need to stay aloft. Lovely!
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