MacCready

Part 2 of 2

So you've had a good day out racing, or perhaps you haven't for whatever reason, there's ways to extend your days lead, or recover it with a strong transition to the final glide!

Matthew Scutter is always hard to catch, but this one particular year, he was gaining often 5 minutes on me just by nailing his final glides into my hometown airport, Kingaroy. I knew my final glides

There are 3 outcomes: save a few minutes, conservative, or land-out (this could be replaced by a low very slow save). Being conservative typically costs a few minutes. Strong high days more because you might stop turning 40 miles from home. Miss timing your glide and landing short of the field will cost you a lot of points, so it is probably best to error towards conservative. The most challenging

I can still remember clearly flying a WGC in an ASW-22. There were great clouds all the way home. My teammates ahead were finding good air. The ground crews were saying the clouds were making it all the way to the airport. But others were still climbing trying to get final glide. It was a calculated risk, but it looked like a great sky.

I headed off, leaving the gaggle I was with and passed

There are a lot of things to remember when flying in these turn areas. Being low on the into the wind turn and high on the downwind turn, the last cloud might not work, putting all of your eggs into one basket...

Now we put these concepts into deciding where to turn in a turn area task. Before you start the flight you need to have a good weather briefing to determine where you are more likely

When can I leave? To thermal is to admit defeat. At least that it is the motto I use when flying Open Class. Club Class is a little different.

I am not making any headway, granted the higher I climb the farther I can glide so it is important, it will help soon but at the moment... I am pretty antsy about getting going again. This is until I started team flying with Sean and he

A few weeks ago I mentioned setting a MacCready setting of 2 (MC=2) for flying between thermals and follow your speed director.  Remember too much time and energy can be spent looking inside to fly the perfect speed. If you miss the next thermal you land-out or get stuck. 

But what about getting home? How do you establish a safety margin? Back as a new student you probably cut the

Speed to fly was the topic of our newsletter two weeks ago.  One of our readers emailed us and pointed out an important aspect of speed to fly and achieved speed, which we will discuss today.

First, I would like to apologize for those of you that landed out last weekend because I may have told you to fly too fast. When I wrote it I more had the new pilot in mind where they want to float

Some think speed to fly means looking at your flight computers up and down arrows.  Others think it's installing a ring on your Winter vario. If you don't' have a speed ring, make sure your Winter vario has a beveled face plate, order the speed ring and 4 weeks later it arrives. Open the box from W&W, suck on your Jolly Rancher as you pop the speed ring on your vario.  Bingo! Instant