Condor and Oudie

Thanks to John Delafield at LX Avionics I now have a shiny new Oudie and LX Nano ready for this years soaring season.

It has to be said that See You Mobile running on the Oudie is an awesome piece of software, it does however due to its nature have a large amount of configurable options. Enter Condor.

It is perfectly simple to connect the Oudie to Condor and in my case I am using the Bluetooth connection to do this. Once connected you simply create your task in the Oudie and when you launch in Condor the NEMA output goes live giving you the full GPS feed.

               Here is my sample setup and a close up of the Oudie in action.

The great thing about using the Oudie with Condor is the ability to get familiar with the interface and tools before you take it into the glider, also for a guy like me without my own ship it is very easy to creat multiple profiles for the different club ships that I might fly, these profiles take in to affect the gliders polar and water loading etc..

Flying in Condor with the Oudie. Condors NEMA output means that you basically have the Oudie working as it would in the cockpit. Thankfully I have learned quite a few things that would of had be stuffed whilst while flying. One of them was that I inadvertently passed the start line whilst climbing before the start, See You started me and I could not figure out how to start again. Short pause read the manual, oh yes either hit go to and navigate back to the start or if you do not have the auto next after the start you have to press the start time indicator to agree with the start otherwise each time your cross the line it generates a new start time. The other big thing I have found is the airspace, whilst on a wave flight the other day for real I found myself constantly checking the map which detracts from ones lookout. with See You you simply tap the airspace ahead double check it against a current map to make sure its correct, or has been updated correctly and carry on. See You will then warn you when you are getting too close.

Finally is the Final glide, you can use the polar, bug, water settings etc.. which actually when you try to do the math can be quite often in correct. See You tells you what L/D you need to get back and what L/D you are currently doing. Both of these are pragmatic and are the actuals irrelevant of flies on the wings and the 20 gallons you have in each wing.

Highly recommended piece of software and method of learning to use it. I may start adding short how too's if anyone is interested.

Passenger to pilot Winter round up

Been a little while since my last post so I thought I would add some more, especially after this weekend.

Not much flying in November and December, a total of six short circuit flights in K13's when weather and planning for Christmas allowed.

In what seems to be a tradition news years day saw the hanger doors opened and a K13 towed onto the field. about six of us turned up for some fun including our CFI, airfield manager and several other team members. Dave Watt was seen with his new cranium cam,

All though in the end he actually forgot to switch it to record so we didn't see them in action.

Leading up to the 7th of Jan I had been keeping an eye on the weather for that weekend to see which day would have the least cloud cover, expected 5/8 on sat and 6-7/8 on Sunday. Saturday looked OK but the wind was strong out of the North, until Fridays forecast when the wind swung westward meaning we could have wave on Saturday. I arrived at the club early, DI'd the Astir and headed out onto the field. Several coffees and an windy winch launch brought us to nearly lunch time and I decided to take a 4k tow into the blue to see what I could find. We headed west towards heyford and the old disused airbase and releasing at 4k over the eastern end of the runway I quickly realised that the eVario did not agree with the mechanical one. The eVario was showing a regular downward trend while the mechanical was showing 1-2kts up, the altimeter confirmed I was climbing so I turned off the eVario, which I suspect is having TE issues. Ahead I could see a wave bar but as I was climbing in the blue I decided to track across wind where I was. I no time at all I was passing 4500ft and as I turned 180 to head back along the bar I saw the lenticular forming to my east, a short tack to get me just above the leni was rewarded with 3kts. the next 25mins were spent exploring the western half of my 5nm from the airfield limit. After working my way to just short of 6500ft the lift was down to a knot and the cloud had started to fill in, mindful that I did not have the turn and slip working I picked my way down to 4000ft back below cloud base. I finished off the hour long flight with a final glide exercise, starting at 2k over heyford I ran the 5nm miles back to the airfield aiming to get there as quickly as possible with a 1000ft remaining didn't take long downwind with a ground speed of ~120knots.

Head over to U tube and search for lhitchins you can access my page and take a look at the 1 hour long flight in HD.

Spring will soon be here

The soaring season seems like an eternity ago, the shortest day seems like it will never come, on some level I think SAD (seasonal affective disorder) must be more prevalent in glider pilots. Our sport is so seasonally dependant and in the UK the soaring season always seems so short.

The club is now getting ready for Christmas, the office is closed from the 20th of December until the 2nd of January.

Members are welcome to organise groups to fly over the holiday period. the Google calendar can be found at https://www.google.com/calendar/render?gsessionid=XNHcTjrLfB6LXz8TbPLwdAe

Login details found in the news letter.

I for one will try to get a flight or two during the holidays.

Passenger to pilot August through October 2011

Work and family has me pretty tied up at the moment so I have been doing enough to maintain currency.

September I had some flying in DFR our Astir for a total time of around 40mins. Difficult day which was making it hard to get away for any lenth of time. I did a couple of winch flights in VE the twin acro aswell during September, finishing of the month with a flight short flight in a K13.

In October I managed to get converted into the Discus. After I had a check ride with one of the instructors I got a full brief and was told to take an aerotow to 4000ft to get a feel for it, after 3 attempts at getting airbourne behind the tug (small amount of PIO) the rest of the tow to 4k was fine. The Discus is a big step up in performance in comparison to the Astir and at times it almost seems as it does not want to come down, it is also a lot sharper on handling, hence the PIO on the initial ground run. After floating around for half an hour of so I carried out a good circuit and managed to get the thing landed reasonably smoothly, the picture looks a lot different when rounding out in a discus as compared to the astir and a K13. I decided I needed another go at the aerotow so took a 2k launch. The ground run was much better this time out, requiring only one attempt at getting airbourne. I managed to find some lift over the town and stayed airbourne for nearly 40mins before coming in. The landing was ok, got a tad slow on round out which meant it was a little bumpy, but hey its a learning curve.

I am now approaching 30hrs - with Bronze C done and my XC navigation exercise to do once we have a motor glider back I am looking forward to setting off into the blue (well with some nicely popped Cu's) next season.

Passenger to pilot windrushers style - August 2011

I had one last attempt at the silver duration in a K8 at the end of July, I landed 2hrs 29minutes into the bid with a sore back and numb legs so it would have been silly to continue, its going to have to be done in a much roomier ship.

Due to the poor weather on my flying days the remainder of my august flying has been confined to circuit flying off the winch, with one flight of 20 odd minutes thanks to some sort of ridge lift off of the railway bank in a stern south westerly maintaining me at 1200ft.

I took the K21 for a 3000ft aerotow for currency and after being towed through a massive sink street to near RAF croughton I released near a promising cloud only to find the Cu's were not honest, broken lift with more decending than climbing involved. I ran across the sink showing 8kts down in places at 80+kts and arrived back at the airfield at near circuit height. I then climbed to 1500ft in half a knot and then headed into land.

More circuit practice at the end of the month, three flights in a K13 using these to practice stalls, wing drops steep turns etc...

I have now revised my goals from getting silver to having my Bronze with XC wrapped up by the end of the year, work and a new baby have meant my flyign frequency has reduced and hey, whats the rush.

The Rasp skew T explained

I have seen on a few occasions puzzled faces surrounding a computer screen, with lots of head scratching and discussions going on and most occurrences these are down to people trying to interpret a sounding for the following day.

I will do my best to explain as simply as possible, so here is a sample sounding.

So first we look at the scales, the left and right vertical axes are height shown in pressure hPa and 1000's of feet, with most soundings showing the boundary layer up to the tropopause. The horizontal axis shows us temperature in degrees Celsius.

The red line shows us the ELR or Environmental Lapse Rate which is the rate at which the atmosphere cools without any added energy. Our blue line shows us the dew point which is the temp the air needs to be in order for it to be fully saturated. Now, the key thing to note is a skew T is not like a standard graph with the point axis (temp) (moisture) travelling straight up the chart, you will notice the orange lines from the temps are slanted up to the right, you will also notice another set of orange diagonal lines sloping from bottom right to top left, these are our air parcel DALR or Dry Adiabatic Lapse Rate which is the rate at which the parcel cools while it is not saturated. The reason they slant is because if the were vertical the chart would be very large and wouldn't make much sense which is why they are skewed, hence the skew T (tephigram)

There are also two green lines, one dotted, which is the water content at a given temp or how saturated it is.we then have the solid green lines which are more vertical, these show the SALR or Saturated Adiabatic Lapse Rate which shows the cooling of the Parcel one it has become saturated.

Also on the right is the wind direction and speed with altitude.

So lets take a closer look,

So on this skew T we can see that the Environmental surface temp for the given time is going to be around 25dc we can also see that the dew point is around 15dc at the surface, Tracing both lines up the graph shows us the general state of the atmosphere in terms of temp and moisture content. Now we can also see a handy dotted line, this shows us the forcasted max temp for the day and what happens to a parcel of air once it reaches this temp. so lets look at its journey.

So our parcel of air (thermal bubble) reaches critical temp of say 26dc (can be higher if it remains on the ground longer, warming up more before it is triggered) it is then triggered into the air. As it begins to rise it expands and cools (I wont get into the intricacies of pressure etc...) at the DLAR or ~3dc per 1000ft which roughly follows the dotted line. As you follow our parcel up draw a line from the dew point Parallel to the nearest moisture content dotted line up until it meets our parcel (something like this)

What happens here is that our parcel has cooled to the dew point, this means it can no longer hold onto its water vapour so it starts to condense, this gives us the LCL or Lifted condensation level or Cloud base for glider pilots and if you look at the scales and apply the dew point difference of 10dc x 400 = 4000ft its almost bang on. from there on the parcel follows the green (more vertical) SALR of around 1.5dc per 1000ft the SALR is less than the DALR because condensation releases latent heat stored during the evapouration process.

A little further up the ELR (red line) you can see a bump indicating a slight inversion (where the air warms slightly or doesn't cool as quick) Now our parcel has saturated before reaching this hump meaning we will have clouds, if as in the example below the parcel does not saturate before the inversion then we have a blue day.

If it looks like this then we will have Cu's

You can see the LCL and then cloud formation begins until it bumps into the inversion, in this example the dew point drops away quickly afterwards which should produce classic Cu's with little spread out  or over development.

Our first example showed the parcel saturating and then following the SALR, it misses (more to the point punches through) the inversion because at that altitude the parcel is still warmer than the surrounding air so continues to rise, now we get into the classic over development situation that causes large CuNim's. The number of degrees between our parcel and the ELR at 500hPa or ~18kft gives us our lifted index in this case a -2, any minus number here indicates instability and the greater it is the more instability there is. The total area between the parcel dotted line and out ELR give us our CAPE or Convective Available Potential Energy which shows how much energy is potentially available, the larger the CAPE value the more powerful any resulting storm/rain shower would be.

The RASP skew T's are not bad, there are some inaccuracies, I usually compare 2 different tephigrams and also a couple of forecasts which give good boundary layer coverage. the only thing to bear in mind is that most models used to forecast diverge after around 48 hours becoming less accurate, they can show you a trend but I always say "oh this weekend looks OK" on Monday or Tuesday and then pick the day to fly on Friday as you have a much better idea.

Hope this helps all those that have been baffled by skew T's and if anyone has any other MET related questions please feel free to ask.

Bicester Regionals 2011 - Saturday 30th

Welcome to saturday two race fans.

Weather for today looks good for today, Cu's forming and RASP has scored it a five, it seems to go down hill out to the far west and east but a band running north west to south east looks great.

Lets see what we get on what could be the best day so far...