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Come Fly With Me

I’ve taken up gliding!

I’ve always been interested in aircraft and aviation, and so I thought I should probably make the most of the opportunity to take it up while it’s nice and easy. So I joined the gliding club and have been on a couple of trips so far this term. The weather precluded flying on the first one, but I got three flights in this saturday:

  1. P2 on Puchacz. 5 mins. Winch launch. Cable Break at ~600ft, so P1 flew an abbreviated circuit. 4 mins
  2. P2 on Puchacz. 5 mins. Winch launch to 950ft. Experimented with glider attitude control and speed.
  3. P2 on ASK21. 21 mins. Aerotow to 3000ft. Normal and Low aerotow positions—Prop wash in between! Turning and attitide control. Making turns using all controls:
    • Ailerons cause asymmetric drag on a glider. Right roll will cause left yaw, so must use right rudder simultaneously.
    • Centralise controls once desired turnrate reached, but need gentle backpressure during turn to keep the nose up.
    P1 Demonstrated stalls at low and moderate airspeed—wings not flying, high sinkrate. Recover with stick forward to gain airspeed.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2004 at 15:25 and is filed under Gliding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

4 Responses to “Come Fly With Me”

  1. John Dale Says:
    November 15th, 2004 at 15:47

    COMMENT:

    If that’s you on the end of the long string, then gliding is tougher than I’d imagined.

  2. Max Hammond Says:
    November 15th, 2004 at 15:52

    Yeah, that’s a glider on the end of the winch. Not me, specifically, because I was on the ground taking the photo, but that’s what it’s like. 0–60 in about 2 seconds, then carefully controlling the attitude of the aircraft to stop Bad Things™ happening.

  3. John Dale Says:
    November 15th, 2004 at 16:45

    Um, I meant the other end; the dark blob hanging down about 10m or so under the glider. ;-)

  4. Max Hammond Says:
    November 15th, 2004 at 16:50

    Hah. Not quite :-)

    There is a story about that though. In the days before the gliding club was so big there, they used to keep sheep on the airfield, to keep the grass short. When they wanted to fly, they’d round the sheep up into a corner. One day, a sheep had escaped from their little corral, and managed to arange itself so that it got it’s horns caught up in the winch cable, resulting in a flying sheep. Up to the point where the tension in the cable cut through the horns, leaving the sheep to plummet to its death…

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