Gliding in my neck of the woods...

[HighBypass 2,339]

Life's been a little hectic recently, but made time this weekend for a glider flight. I am learning to fly gliders in real life from here. I cannot remember if Chock's flown from here or not, although possibly some AVSIM members have.

(NOTAM - a real thunderstorm chased away my gliding opportunity today at the club today (Bowland Forest Gliding Club) The sim won't actually fry me with a real lightning strike, so carry on!!)

Our club does have a K21, although not in these colours.

Waiting at the end of RWY12. There's the hill in the background (Parlick)

Here's what the view for takeoff looks like. The field does slope downhill for a bit. The clubhouse and hangar are behind the trees to the left. Longride Fell is dead ahead.

The winch cable's live and we're waiting for the "all out" signal. A bit of a crosswind, but no real problem.

After a good launch (about 1200 feet) we head towards Parlick to hopefully find some ridge lift and some thermals - after all there's the odd thunderstorm about.

After a beat or two up and down the east bowl, we're heading back south west. A local beauty spot - Beacon Fell can be seen in the upper centre of the shot.

The view out of the left side of the canopy shows Longridge Fell stretching across the top of the shot.

At least there's no rain yet!

I can see my house from here! We fly over my home town, well village really: Chipping.

I mentioned Beacon Fell earlier - here's a closer look, just above the side of the cockpit. All pine trees and scrubland, but a nice place for a picnic all the same.

There's the west coast of England in the distance. (FSX NOTAM the dark blotches are the shadows created by Cumulus X, but they don't quite work properly in FSX:SE under DX10)

Back to Parlick to top up some height. The club field is just above the glider in this shot.

We needed the height to ensure we could fly out to the town of Longridge itself yet still not have to land out. Longridge is where I spent most of my life until my mid twenties. I can see my parent's house from here!

Well, we've not been hit by lightning nor rained out of the sky, so time to head back. Flying past the airfield with a fair bit of height to lose - no problem for me LOL!

A bit fast on approach, but that will soon bleed off.

No landing shots as I was concentrating..... :)

Waiting for a tractor to come and recover us.

Enjoy.

[Chock 17,769]

Wow, what a cool set of pics. To answer the question about there, yup, I have flown from there (and landed there) but only once.

Here's a good recommendation for FSX if you like gliding in that sim (Condor etc notwithstanding). As I'm sure you know, it's usually a bit easier to determine the wind direction in real life than it is in FSX, what with checking out the windsock whilst waiting to launch, hanging about in the launch queue with the wind blowing and freezing your arse off, putting tires on the wings with them facing the right way to stop the wind blowing them around when parked, the launch direction etc, etc. But with FS, two add-ons (one free and the other payware) which really help are the freeware Power Project, since it puts chimneys and cooling towers in the sim, with their attendant smoke columns, and Steve's payware DX10 Fixer add on with the supplementary Cloud Shadow add on. Cloud shadows, as in real life when gliding I'm sure you are aware, are really handy for determining which way to head into ridge lift. Not forgetting of course the other useful one in the sim itself, which is to put it on natural thermal visualisation so you can simply fly over to where the birds are and start thermalling with them as you do in real life in a glider.

Hope your real life gliding is going well, it's currently awesome weather in the UK for that as you know. the previous two days were two of the best 'blue days' I've ever seen, real Diamond Height Badge stuff.

[HighBypass 2,339]

Cheers! I run Steve's fixer and cloud shadows are active, however, I think the sim decided there was a little too much overcast for them to be visible. Only the dodgy shadows from Cumulus X (it tries to generate proper thermal activity) seemed to be visible. I never did see any birds despite having natural visualisation enabled. I did find some thermic activity in this flight although no visual clues apart from the vario kicking in.

In real life, I couldn't get  to the club on Friday evening. Today as I've mentioned was thunderstorms stopped play, so i didn't get to fly Couldn't get there this morning so last on the list. Oh well, only a few minutes drive from home to the club :). Mind you I wouldn't want to have been up anywhere near the storm I saw building up!!

Last week's flight was pretty awesome  though. Everything was working, the ridge and thermals. I got to actually try my hand at thermalling, got to about 2200 feet. No higher because that's where the cloudbase was! It's great flying along with them just a few feet above the canopy. the instructor had me practice some stalls too. I did the approach, but he took over for the landing as the conditions got interesting.

 

EDIT I'll have a look for the power project, thanks.

Edited May 27, 2017 by HighBypass

[Chock 17,769]

2200 is pretty good from a winch launch on a typical day in the UK, since most winches are anything from 800 ft for a crappy one to around 1200 feet when you get it right and all goes well, so it's double your launch height as a gain, and you'd be kinda running out of lift under the cloud base anyway. Of course when the weather improves a bit again and you can get up a bit higher you can get some spin practice in, which is one of the real fun parts of learning to fly. I could still do that all day long and not get bored lol.

Yup, it is very cool flying along just under the clouds although kinda scary if you winch launch up into them if you've ever done that - in which case it's hands off the stick and let the elevator trim get the thing to level off (which is why you should always trim a bit nose down for a launch of course), two good yanks on the cable release asap and then open the spoilers until you can see daylight again lol, since if the gliders you fly are anything like the ones I'm used to, they'll have no artificial horizon.

[HighBypass 2,339]

You're right Alan. No artificial horizons in our K13 or K21. I have winch launched into clouds twice before and it is quite eerie waiting for the ground to reappear - on the bright side it was the instructor's problem - both times they advised me we'd be releasing at about cloudbase.

[Chock 17,769]

Really like 'old bangers' like the K-13, I like watching the sunlight coming through the covering stretched across all that metal tubing.

[woodhick 504]

Fine series.  For some reason the shots look familiar though.  LOL

[HighBypass 2,339]

LOL Dan - yep. I just copied it over from the Greenbriars blog as I wasn't sure if I could link to it from AVSIM :)