Speed to Fly
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September 30, 2021
In these articles I have avoided reference to specific times of the day - because so much can depend on a particular day, how far east or west you are in your time zone, and what time of year it is. In this section of the article, I define “late in the day” as whatever period your achieved climbs are beginning to trend down in strength because of lower surface heating. As this occurs you have to make
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September 16, 2021
Mitigating Risk by Course Selection
One of the biggest impediments to an early start on a good day is the risk that we will start too early, land out in the first hour or so, and ruin what would otherwise be a great soaring day. Fortunately, there is a technique of task layout that manages this risk very well. It involves planning a task with a short run opposite
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June 03, 2021
Typically when we start with our cross-country flying, we feel like we need to take every thermal, this habit is often a hard one to break. Even pilots who are quite experienced still want to stop and climb in thermals that are less than optimum. We have to be selective when it comes to increasing our overall achieved cross-country speeds. Take the below graph, it’s for a typical 15m ballasted racing
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February 06, 2020
One of the key points to getting speed & points at a competition is judging your average speed for the day, versus the optimum part of the day for the task at hand. Why is this important & how do I do it?
Start Time
I'm not sure what you notice in the States, but typically in Australia, the last starters usually do the best. What else do I notice that people say?
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January 23, 2020
I've just gotten back from the STD Class, Lithuanian World Gliding Championships, 2016. It was my worst result ever, I can't remember a time that I was in so many fields. A strange feeling occurred, I'd never doubted my abilities so much, yet when I got back to Australia, I felt the expectation, I should be faster now than I was before...
I outlanded on my first task, on the 2nd glide actually! -
December 01, 2016
You got low (you probably made promises to anyone you could think of) and now finally have a weak climb. You switched to survival mode and only cared about climbing, no matter how slow. You haven't mentally recovered from that low point and you are still happy with that weak climb all the way back to the top of your working band.
You probably threw in the towel and are just thinking about getting
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August 11, 2016
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
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July 28, 2016
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
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July 14, 2016
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