Being Prepared
We finally made it to the last practice day at the World Gliding Championships. It has been a string of difficulties from car delays, to weight issues, missing paperwork, phone issues, missed connecting flights, etc.
But we made it and took to the skies. Mike learned of an issue in the tail battery during his training flight in Terlet, so we are just using them as tail ballast. So an easy fix was to just run on the main battery, which should be sufficient. However, after an hour, the rear LX9000 was showing a low battery. After the first turn, the back seat went dark. Then a little while later the front seat went out.
Our message to our illustrious team captain was: “Good News: We are flying and looks ok home direction. Bad news: battery dead. Worse news: cannot raise the engine.”
We had a winter vario in the front seat, so we continued on with that for our climbs, of course, it is in m/s so we just double the value to get it to knts. Both Mike and I are comfortable with using a mechanical vario with no audio. All those hours in a 2-33 are paying off. Especially since it was just like a 2-33 and I had to look over Mike’s shoulder to see the instruments. I pulled out the paper map and continued to the next turn. Beautiful country-side, with lots of small villages with wandering roads and rivers. It took a while to figure out where I was.
We have a back-up logger, a Nano3, which will do the navigating beautifully, assuming you downloaded the appropriate database…which we had not.
The decision to continue on course just came from the fact that heading direct towards home was bad air as it had rained there earlier and the sky looked dead. It was clear to continue towards the next turnpoint, as the sky looked very good in that direction. We had 2 climbs with a pegged vario. Just how far we would go was the question. The easiest part of navigating is near the airport are some nuclear cooling towers, which are very easy to see from a distance. But as we made it closer to home, we realized we might as well just complete the task.
The rules of thumb that I mentioned a few weeks ago, turned out to be difficult when trying to convert to meters. 5 miles per thousand feet is pretty common. But what do we do in meters? Should we convert to feet then back again? Then we realized a 45km glide at 1000meters would be 45:1. Since the last turn was 44km away this should be easy math. I could not figure out the scale to the chart I was using, so we were really lost on distances also.
If only I could actually navigate to the correct turnpoint we would have made it. But we missed the turnpoint and came home high.
We are currently on Day 5 and everything is sorted. Mike and I are climbing the score sheet slowly. The weather has been amazing, one of the days was won at over 100mph. We keep hoping for lower bases and weaker thermals.
Banner Photo: Mika Ganszauge
Garret Willat holds a flight instructor rating with over 8000 hours in sailplanes. His parents have owned Sky Sailing Inc. since 1979. He started instructing the day after his 18th birthday. Since then, Garret has represented the US Junior team in 2003 and 2005. He graduated from Embry-Riddle with a bachelor's degree in Professional Aeronautics. Garret represented the US Open Class team in 2008 and 2010 and the Club Class team in 2014. Garret has won 3 US National Championships.