Thanks for all the information in theis thread Al. I found it all very interesting and your explanation about different navigation is excellent.

Great story Al. I have often thought about going gliding and was offered to go with a young instructor who I met some years ago at my wife's office Xmas party. Now the interesting thing about this fellow is he was born with a deformed hand so basically only has one useable hand and does not have any type of prosthetic. After reading your story I might just get in contact with him and see if he's still willing to take me up.

You should do so. Really, gliding is excellent fun, most gliders are fairly aerobatic, typically stressed to about +4 and -2 G or more, and they really do teach you a lot about how much the air you fly through affects things. The canopies of gliders and the reclined position you tend to sit in, on a chute, make the ride very reminiscent of a jet fighter too, with excellent visibilty and a bit more bodily tolerance to G loading, and of course they also have a stick rather than a yoke, so you'll probably find the controls a bit more intuitive.

 

Just watch out for the adverse yaw, that big wingspan means you need to use a good bootful of rudder to kick them into a turn and there's no propwash to help with that either, but whatever you do, don't give it too much rudder at high speeds outside the green arc on the ASI, you'd overstress the tailfin. And you don't want to do that!

 

Al

These few points may have been mentioned, but if not:

 

Plans should be made with care applied to the cruise altitudes to keep traffic apart:

In feet; Odd 1000s for East going plans, even 1000s for West, and 500ft extra for VFR plans.

 

Intersections on airways are calculated from the "intersection" of two VOR radials. Often too far apart, as it was said at the start these are really only used with modern GPS equipment.

 

There are airspace restrictions that may allow the aircraft through them as long as the aircraft is above a certain altitude, you may need to plan for that as well as mountains.

I learned to fly Gliders in Central Florida from a guy who got tired of shoveling show in Colorado and moved everything South and bought or rented a grass strip in the middle of one of the swamps. I think I had maybe 5 flights, each one between 8 - 10 minutes or so. In that area at that time of the year we got a simple tow to altitude and didn't wander too far from the landing strip. If you got lucky and found a thermal to two, then all the better, you got a couple of extra minutes of air time. Pretty uneventful.

 

A few years later, I'm in Hawaii on vacation and I see these Gliders just floating along the edge of the bluff along the shoreline. I traveled with my logbook at the time and I had never taken my wife up in a Glider so I found the place and was thinking about flying in Florida when the tow pilot asked how long I was going to be up the his glider. Being dumb, I answered, just this one flight. OK dummy, how long is this flight going to be? duh. Depends on me finding some thermals. OK, stay up as long as you like. Hmmm.

 

Reality started to come to me when the tow pilot started his tail waggle at about 1,000 feet. In Florida it would have been more like 4 - 5,000 feet. I told my wife, the tow plane must be in trouble, he wants to cut us loose. I hesitated a little to long, and he started turning back to the airport and really wagging his tale. I pulled the release and the glider started an instant climb like I had never felt. All along that part of the island you could easily stay up all day with zero effort. After about an hour, my wife was ready to do something else so we headed back to the airport. My training paid off and I made perfect approach and landing.

 

As soon as i popped the canopy, the owner came running out and said 'jump in your car and haul &@($* Call me this afternoon with your credit card number." What's going on? The miltiary is on the way over here, they just called and told me to make sure you don't leave before they get here. I was doing turns around a point, with the point being Radar domes. Turned out the whole area was a 'restrctred area' and the owner just forgot to tell me and I was too stupid to buy a local sectional chart. I beat feet and got away clean.

 

Fun day.

 

Ray

Nice one Ray.

LOL Ray. That's a fun tale, reminds me of the first solo flight I made from Husbands Bosworth years ago, which was an old Wellington Bomber airfield in WW2; there was a restricted area near there, over some clay pits if I recall correctly, and sure enough, I started losing lift and it looked like the only place there was any lift was right over where those clay pits were...

 

So I'm thinking, hmm, should I? But thought better of it and as a result I was really scraping for altitude to get back to the airfield, and started to wish I'd gone for it over that restricted bit, when fortunately I picked up some lift right before I was contemplating what was going to be a very tight downwind at about 600 feet by my estimation. As it turned out, I ended up going really long on the downwind because of that lucky thermal and actually had to use a lot of spoiler coming in to prevent landing too far down the field. Landing fairly short is preferable on Hus Bos, because halfway down the field there's a rut right across the grass, which you can actually make out from the air, but not on the ground, and if you go over that on the landing rollout with any speed still on the clock, you really know about it, because it jolts your &@($* and back like crazy and makes a bang that has you thinking you've broken something on the aircraft.

 

Incidentally, unless you ask for 4,000, most tow pilots in the UK will wave you off at 2,000 on a sunny day; 5,000 would be a luxury in Blighty.

 

Al