Bi-annual Flight Review

I took my biannual flight review (bfr) this Wednesday.  The BFR is required for pilots and consists of a few flights with an instructor and an hour of ground training.  I took mine from Ron Ogden, our V.P. of Operations at Harris Hill and one of our certified glider instructors.

You can't fail a BFR, but it is possible that you may not pass it.  For me, I wasn't too keyed up about taking it -as Ron told me, it is designed to be a learning experience rather than a testing experience.

We met at the field and discussed issues that were mainly related to aeronautical decision making.  As Ron said, and I whole-heartedly agree, knowing all the stuff about airspace and procedures is just fine but the FAA doesn't require very much training related to decision making.  And in soaring, a decision you made 5 minutes ago can have some very dire consequences.

I've flow power *some* -about 130 hours worth, but from my point of view, the most important part of flying is the decisions that you make.  In fact, piloting an aircraft differs most from driving a car in this respect.  Decisions you make in the pre-flight, cruise, and landing phase all have a huge influence on the successful outcome of a flight.

Skill-wise, I'd rate myself at the bottom of the average scale for skills.  Pilots are like anyone else, some are much more naturally inclined to excel at the stick and rudder skills and for some it just doesn't come as naturally.  For me, it's not so much that I'm a poor pilot, I'm just not a hot shot ace like some of the glider Gods at the field.  Of course, if I thought I was not capable of flying, I would stop.  So, maybe it's not quite as bad as I'm making it out.

Anyhow, I try to compensate for my average-ness by ensuring I don't get into situations that require heroic saves and incredible pilot skills.  Because most people don't have those -that's why they are heroic and incredible.  Maybe I do and don't know it.  But I'm not intending to find out.  I fly for fun and therefore I fly conservatively.

After our discussion about issues that were of concern to me - low level spins and how they develop, landing to the north, how far one can safely stray from the field and still count on returning and so on, we headed out to an ASK-21 for the first flight.  Ron asked me if I'd flown from the back before and I told him I'd only done it once and would like to try.  I got in the back, we hooked up, and off we went.

There was a light west wind that pulled us to the left of the tow plane.  I was concentrating on keeping the wings level as we pulled left.  I couldn't really see the tow plane until we were kind of far out of position, then I didn't apply enough correction to arrest the drift.  I reached for the tow release as Ron kicked in a little more rudder and stopped the drift.  The rest of the tow and flight went fine, with me a little embarrassed at not acting quick enough.

On landing, I realized I had probably been landing with a bit too little energy all along (see my previous posts on 'plopping it in'.  We then switched over to the Schweizer 2-33 to land down at the Elmira airport since I'd never landed there before.  We took a handheld radio along and I called the tower as we approached their airspace.   As Ron had told me, there was plenty of room to land -and there was.  Wow!  Landing at Harris Hill is like putting it down on an aircraft carrier compared to Elmira.  We could easily have gotten low on our base leg and landed across the airport without and worries at all.

After we landed, the tow plan came down from Harris Hill and picked us up.  We made my second unassisted takeoff (where you have one wing on the grass and the tow plane pulls you along until it comes off the ground), headed up to Harris Hill and landed on the runway there.

That was it.  Now I'm certified for two more years of flight on my own.  It hardly seems like it's been two years since I earned my glider rating.  It's more of a challenge than it ever was before as I'm trying to fly more smoothly and professionally than I have in the past.

Next year - I'll go for my commercial ticket so I can fly passengers!

Webcam replaced!

I've replaced the webcam at Harris Hill with the new Microsoft Lifecam VX5000.  Using the pinhole camera trick, I modified it into an outdoor camera and built a small enclosure with plexiglass on either end of a pvc pipe.  The cam is mounted inside and hangs from the overhang by the porch at the flight center.

It looks a lot like the cantenna I made for the WiFi connection.

Time will tell if this camera is worth it or not, but so far, the pictures are sharper and cleaner than the previous webcam.  The webcam has proven to be the most popular feature of the weather station install.  Everybody checks in on it to see what's going on up there.

Upgrading the web cam at Harris Hill

The web camera I put up on Harris Hill works great and I've had lots of comments about how helpful it is to have a camera so people can see what is going on.

However, the quality is poor (if this image doesn't look too bad it means I've replaced the camera).

  

I had a replacement camera of better quality - the Microsoft Lifecam VX5000.  However, that camera had AWFUL quality when placed outdoors.  Turns out this is a common problem and I found a fix for it on instructables.com.

It seems the aperture is set wide for webcams so they look good indoors.  This causes them to have way too wide an aperture when used outdoors.  The instructables site told me that fixing this was as simple as taking the camera apart and placing a piece of cardboard with a pinhole aperture over the lens opening.

It worked!  Incredibly, when I did that, the camera became suitable for outdoor use.  A little adjustment with the image controls gave me acceptable -and better, image quality.

I plan on replacing the existing camera in a weatherproof enclosure this weekend when I'm up at Harris Hill for my monthly duty cycle.  Hopefully, the little piece of plastic I used will remain in place with the airplane glue I use to bond it to the lens surrounding.

Plopping it in

Okay, I've officially gone from one side of the spectrum to the other.  Instead of bouncing when landing, I'm now firmly attacking the ground with a 'PLOP'! in crosswinds.

This is actually good news.  I've over corrected in the opposite direction.  Which means the answer lies somewhere in between.  I'm determined to find it.  My landings, while safe and acceptable, are kind of embarrassing.

I've seen this before with my flying.  I've got quite a few flights in on the ASK-21 now and I can handle it pretty well.  So, I've got enough experience with it that I OUGHT to know better but there's some kind of mental block associated with crosswind landings.

It's worth noting that I'm expanding the envelope of flying in the 21, also.  I've carefully expanded my crosswind experience by flying in stronger crosswinds in it, a few knots at a time.  So, the situation I'm referring to is one where the winds are higher or gusty and not blowing down the runway.  So it is a little more challenging to begin with, but I'd like to make it smoother.

Landing hot

Twice in the last couple of flights I've had slight directional control issues when landing the ASK-21 in a crosswind.

Each time, it has been a good touchdown but then a sudden swerve to one side and a not so pretty rollout.  Nothing to worry too much about, but it reeks of sloppy technique.

The complicating factor is the crosswind, of course, but after some analysis, I think it goes beyond that.  I think I've been landing hot -that is, too fast.  The right speed to fly when coming down final, barring gusty conditions, is right around 55 knots.  The ASK-21 stalls at considerably below that speed, perhaps 37 knots or even less.

Both times I've swerved, I've been right on the approach speed.  Problem is, I think, is that I'm touching down at that speed.  Touching down too fast means you have too much energy in the glider and it makes it easy to bounce.  In both cases, I've bounced.  Once because I didn't flare quite enough, the other time because I crossed the taxiway which is a slight mound, and bounced into the air briefly.  Each time, the crosswind swung me a bit and I touched down in a crab and swerved.

I've been touching down too fast because I was not happy with getting too slow on landing in previous attempts.  Those touchdowns were all quite good but I thought I was slowing too much in the flare.  I need to re-evaluate that.  Previously, I was flaring at just the right altitude and slowing to touch down, just a bit low with the tail first.  But recently, I've been touching down faster in that crosswind, probably because I'm worried about getting blown sideways as I touchdown.

Also, I may still be carrying a bit too much altitude into the landing.  I'm using full spoilers to get to the point I want to touch down on and I'm still going 55 knots when I get there.  In the ASK-21, if you do that, you can get a rather quick settling of the glider if you let it slow up too high and that requires you to put the spoilers in a little bit and pick that speed back up.  An unstable approach leads to a poor landing.  I'm going to work on trying to prevent that from happening.

It's a delicate balance between floating in that flare too long and touching down with too much energy.  I'm going to redouble my efforts to try and put the airplane down where I want to and stop where I intend to, all at the right speeds and numbers.

Flying the ridge

One of the great things about soaring is discovering that other people are just as much in love with it as you are.  Today I went out to Harris Hill to give some support to the members who are in training.  Turns out there weren't that many students there and the tow pilot was only good for another 1/2 hour or so.

BUT.  The wind was practically straight out of the north at about 12 knots.  That means RIDGE flying, boys and girls!  I grabbed a glider and just before I got into it, one of our members, Graham Hall, joined me for what turned out to be a delightful flight!

After we cleared the edge of the ridge on takeoff, the expected elevator-o-lift kicked in and we were climbing out with the vertical speed indicator pegged at 10 knots!  The whole tow to 2,000 feet took just one circle.  Graham was flying and we cut loose and headed for the nearby ridge.

The lift was there, just as expected.

When wind blows against a tall hill, and particularly a ridge, it will strike the ridge and continue upward.  As long as the wind continues to blow, the lift from that ridge will continue upward.  If your glider descends at 200 feet per minute and the wind blows upward at greater than 200 fpm, you will go UP.

That's where we found ourselves on this particular day.  We shared the ride along Harris Hill and the ridge with a 1-34 and a Duo Discus as we flew back and forth along the ridge.  Graham flew some, then I flew some.  Graham found some lift at one edge of the ridge and circled in it, at one point getting us up to 3,500 feet - just 200 feet below where we let off to begin with.

The setting sun was beautiful, the day was crisp and clear, and we could see the all the way down to Mansfield, PA where the windmill farm is.  It was just gorgeous.  Landing was uneventful and was a perfect end to a perfect flight.  Best flight of the year, I'd say!

Here, Graham's expression sums it all up as he maneuvers us into the lift:

Weather station online!

This week I completed the weather station project and was able to get it online!  It's been working properly for several days in a row and now we've got both weather observations, history, and even a webcam so you can see Harris Hill and the National Soaring Museum has a presence with their name on it out in weather station land.

From Soaring

View the weather station page here: http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KNYELMIR5

Also, some more pilot specific pages that use the weather data are on our Harris Hill web site: http://www.harrishillsoaring.org/weather.htm

For those interested, here are the details of how the system works.

First, the system uses a Davis Vantage Pro 2 weather station mounted on our Flight Center.  That's it on the right hand side on the white pole in the photo below.  The tripod device in the center is a local weather station but it did not have the capability to place data on the internet, so we needed the Vantage Pro.

From Soaring

Second, is a web cam that looks out at the flight line.  Unfortunately, the picture isn't nearly this clear, but the camera was free, so beggars can't be choosers.  It works well enough but I may see about getting something with higher resolution.

From Soaring

Here's the web cam location (below, it is the white blotch with the extra cable hanging off of it above the window)

From Soaring

Here's a closeup.

From Soaring

The webcam uses a cable that connects to a computer (upper right above the window) while the weather station sends its data wirelessly to the console (mounted about halfway up between the windows in this photo).  The console has a USB plug that connects to the computer and downloads the weather station data periodically.

From Soaring

From Soaring

The computer has a WiFi USB dongle that is stuck in the window of the Flight Center, below.

From Soaring

Then comes the interesting part.  The Flight Center does not have internet access, but the National Soaring Museum has limited net access via a satellite connection.

From Soaring

Distance from the Flight Center to the NSM is around 1,000 feet.
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From Soaring

At the soaring museum end is a cantenna.  Literally, an antenna made from a tin can.  Bush's baked beans, to be exact.  Vegetarian, of course.  The can is encased in a length of pvc pipe for weatherproofing and mounted on the side of the NSM pointing at the flight center.  I found invaluable instructions for how to build this on this site.

From Soaring

The antenna wire is routed inside the building to a WiFi router (Linksys WRT54G) inside and a cable connects the router to the NSM internet router.  The data on the weather computer is sent to wunderground.com and the Harris Hill soaring weather pages here.

That's it!  We now have visual and weather observations for the Hill from afar.  I've already used it to gauge when the winds shifted from the South to the Northwesterly direction and make flying possible.  Other members also seem pleased with the system.

This was a fun project and one that I *thought* was within my technical abilities but wasn't sure about.  It took longer than I wanted, but in the end I'm really pleased I was able to figure out all the little twists and turns involved.  AND, now the NSM has a presence on the web so people will see what's up at Harris Hill!

Off topic bonus:  Today I flew 2 hours and 15 minutes in the ASK-21.  Good times.