Practice Good Soaring Habits

In a stressful or out of the ordinary situation you are going to do what you have been practicing and will probably use muscle memory. I will highlight a few of my pet peeves.

Get out of the glider in the order you bailout. Have you watched some pilots practice each time they climb out? They open the canopy, undo their belts, climb out and reach for the D ring. These pilots are serious about getting out quickly.

The last thing you want to do while attempting to bailout is do what Goose did in Top Gun. It would also be bad if you got out of the glider without the parachute. I always have my students open the canopy first before undoing belts. When we wear a parachute we climb out of the glider with it on.

Don't give lip service to the takeoff emergencies. We always talk about a rope break however we could have a partial or complete engine failure. Receiving the rope is a different experience than catching up to the towplane (same reaction for the glider). We practice with students a 200-300ft turn. Have you built that muscle memory to just turn around when the rope breaks? You might accidentally try and attempt it at a lower altitude.

Practice each landing as if it was an off-field landing. Practice your pattern using your touchdown point and angles. Don't make patterns using surrounding landmarks. It is easy to get complacent.

Look before you turn. When thermalling at home you need to make sure you do not just feel the thermal and 'yank and bank'. You need to get into the habit of looking first. We do hundreds of turns with nobody there, but it only takes once. This becomes increasingly important when approaching gaggles and you need to look around and not stare at the swarm of gliders.

Not looking is probably my most common critique during flight reviews.

Banner Photo:  Josh Bean

Color Instrument Tubing is a good way to separate by color code capacity, total energy, pitot, and static sources.  Typically yellow tubing is for capacity, green tubing for total energy, red for pitot and blue for static.

S10/S100 Variometer - LXNAV newest standalone digital variometer has a final glide calculator, IGC flight recorder and navigation system with a moving map. It's extremely bright 2.5’’ (~ 6.5cm) color display is readable in all sunlight conditions and has the ability to adjust the backlight.

 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.