Monthly Archives: May 2021

During a landout in a glider, you may find yourself in a hostile environment lasting for several hours to several days. While most US pilots think of the desert or Rocky Mountain areas as the likely place for an extended stay to occur, it can just as easily happens closer to home. In April 2007 a very experienced ridge soaring pilot went down along the forested Alleghany Mountains in Pennsylvania.

One thing that is said time & time again is that the greatest improvement in our achieved cross-country speed will come from increasing our average rate of climb, but how can we work towards this? Practice makes perfect of course. In all reality, once a thermal has been found and centred, most pilots will climb at around the same rate, and most gliders are reasonably similar in performance. So

Real-time Wind Indication

For the glider pilot, it is essential to know how the air mass is moving in its surroundings. Today's TEK Varios work very well for measuring vertical airmass movement if the airplane's speed is approximately constant, e.g., when circling.

As important as the vertical movement of the airmass is

When we soar across country we are inevitably treading a fine line. On one hand, we want to go as fast as possible, but on the other, we need to stay airborne! As time goes on & as our experience grows, there are times when we have trouble finding that balance. At first, we need all of our attention to simply stay afloat, then we realise to make any headway we need to push a bit harder.  What