On Saturday, July 22, Frank Dimeo completed his first solo flight in an SGS-2-33A. The flight was excellent and he should have no difficulty continuing his learning experiences to complete his private pilot training.
Also on Saturday, Gary Helmstetter received a biennial flight review - in an SGS-2-33A. Prior to this, when was the last time anybody saw Gary fly one of these clunky things??
On Sunday, a prospective new member, Mike Sherwood, took an introduction flight. Mike is a programmer that just relocated from Maine to the Boston area, and found us via the 'web'.
A note to all members: It appears that the Sterling fair will be 7 days long with the second weekend in September the highlight of the event. Since the airport 'clean-up' will most likely not be completed by the third weekend in September for us to move back from Franconia.....anybody want to stay up north for another weekend?
- Dave Zlotek
Editor's note: You can respond to Dave via this link.
Sunday was another boomer day. And a great day of soaring for me. The conditions were a bit strange. Cloud base was about 4,500'. Higher for some people. Most everything that looked good wasn't, and places the showed no logical reason to produce lift, did! I got to the field early and was the first to sign up for the new Blanik, and got my one hour flight in with Rick's brother as a passenger. Later, Roland was about to take off in the L-13 solo, and I shammed him into taking a passenger, me. No reason to take up a two seater with one seat empty! Got another hour in. About 2:00 I took a single seater up and got two more hours in.
Four hours of soaring on a Sunday in club ships. Life is good!
It was also the first time I've seen all GBSC and all MITSA gliders either flying or on the line, even their 1-26 flew for the first time this season. At one point we had four tow planes operating at the field.
Thanks to all the volunteers that made it and make it happen.
- Dick Ruel
I couldn't resist the temptation to "upgrade" gliders and finally succumbed to the allure of Bill Poore's advertising on R.A.S. (Rec-Aviation-Soaring) and made the mistake of looking at his advertised LS-6b. I was somewhat wary of the ship, since he first put it on the market for over 50K$ and had dropped the price significantly so I assumed that there must be something wrong with the it. That turned out to be wrong, the LS-6b was built at the end of 1987 and is in immaculate condition, the only real damage having been a gear collapse landing which was professionally repaired. This fine ship/price coupled with the fact that another club member was interested in buying my LS-4a as she had just sold her standard Cirrus culminated in my purchasing the new ship on Saturday morning.
It turns out that the LS-6b wings are lighter than the LS-4a's but still required manual connection. The flaps and ailerons are combined into flaperons which span almost the whole length of each wing, the roll rate at any flap setting remains quite good. At first I thought I wouldn't like the trim wheel, which is similar to that of power planes, but the system works very well. The first tow in the LS-6b was a great one, it was similar enough to the LS-4a that I didn't have to worry about anything and the handbook recommends setting positive flaps and not changing them during the tow. I released into a gaggle of 2 other gliders and used their thermal to get to 6000' msl (4000' agl) and played around with stalls at different flap settings; all of which showed that the Rolladen-Schneider manufacturers remained true to form and built a solid glider with no bad habits.
The monsoons had moved into Arizona and the remnants of the previous night's thunderstorms had lingered around the valley and turned into a thick cirrus layer. By 11:00am the mountains to the north (Prescott, Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon) had already been inundated by violent T-storms and I could hear the Prescott glider operation's 2-33 radio in that they were in heavy rain and going down like a rock (scary thought in a 2-33, isn't it?). The other private ships headed off for Wickenburg (50Km) and I joined them, not finding any lift and getting to pattern altitude over the airstrip at Circle City - but a small thermal on the upwind leg prevented my first LS-6b flight from being a landout and I got back up to 4000' agl. By the time I made Wickenburg the other pilots had decided to continue west towards distant Salome in conditions that seemed better, but I chose discretion and flew back to Turf gliderport, where Barbara was about to launch in my old and her new "S4".
I won't go in to her comments on the ship, but she did radio "Wow, this is GREAT!" while still on tow, so it should suffice to say that she's a happy camper.
The hills to the north now had 3 layers of cloud - a high stratocirrus layer that was thinning out, another lower layer of stratocumulus that was still very high and then a bottom layer of cumulus leaning towards CuNim and I decided to try to check it out. Since the clouds were 20 miles from Turf and the terrain underneath the clouds was up to 7500' msl with nothing landable twixt them and home I chose a very conservative course and remained above final glide the whole time (which wasn't too bad considering that the LS-6b probably gets around 44:1) and finally connected to some lift that got me high enough to risk getting underneath the cloud deck. It was so dark under the clouds that it almost looked like night and I could see the headlights of cars on distant I-17. But the convective activity was working and a 8-knotter took me to cloudbase at 14,000' (fortunately it was no higher as I hadn't bothered to hook up the O2 system). I reflexed the flaps fully and screamed along underneath the clouds at over 100 knots; my smile couldn't have been wider than my ears but I do know that my cheek muscles ached after the flight! My exhilaration at the good conditions, coupled with the radio announcement of 2 landouts by the others plus the feeling of a great glider quickly went away when the clouds started dumping water and the vario went from sweet-sounding and high-pitched "beep-beep-beep" to a very baleful bass sound which quickly cut out completely (the Westerboer does this past 12 knots of sink). A quick 180 and soon I was back at cloudbase.
With all that altitude to play with I headed back for Wickenburg, I think I did this subconsciously so that I could go over to where I'd heard my fellow pilots had landed and gloat. Halfway there I realized that both Cliff and Tony outmassed me and I should choose my opponents more carefully, so I used the altitude to hit Wickenburg and Luke AFB 4 before returning home for the obligatory contest finish (less friendly souls might call it an unauthorized high-speed, low-altitude pass; but that is merely a matter of semantics) and landing. The landing setting of the flaps are pretty effective and I landed much shorter than I wanted to.
I'm still smiling a day later...
-Arnd.