Gliding - a good complement to powered GA?

Nestor wrote:

The CFI, a former French Air Force NCO, would slap your head from behind (instructor seats behind you) if the ball or wool string wouldn’t remain in the middle, or tell you you’d kill yourself if you showed up unstabilized, too high or too low on final.

So true, happend to me many times.

Peter wrote:

I did wonder how often someone does not manage to get back to base, and has to be picked up.

It depends. While learning to fly you are typically confined to the area close to the field (initially 5 km) and at such altitudes that you can always glide back to the field. Obviously the fact that even a basic trainer glider has a glide ratio of 1:30 or better helps a lot here.

Only when people starting to go x-country do they actually get beyond gliding range. Outlandings are a bit more common there. And when people enter competitions it may happen that the whole field makes an outlanding. Especially if the weather turned out worse than forecast by the task setters.

There’s even a competition each year, the “Euroglide”, where people have to fly a task of several 1000s of kilometers. It starts in NL, typically goes east well into Eastern Europe, then to Southern Europe, then back to NL. (Route this year was Venlo (NL), Plock (PL), Krosno (PL), Venlo (NL).) Participating in this event is typically done with teams of four persons to a two-seat aircraft. Two people will fly the route as far as they can, resulting in a (virtually guaranteed) outlanding. The other two will follow with a camper and a car with the trailer, and these roles will swap every day. They pick up the glider from the field at the end of the day, find the nearest campsite, sleep, and the next morning find the nearest gliding club to get a winch launch or aerotow, and pick up the route again. This way, the competition may take a week or more to finish. (Obviously you can also do it with a “turbo”, SLMG or TMG, which is a lot easier but far less of a challenge.)

http://www.euroglide.nl/news.php

There needs to be a system in place for that. Does everyone with a glider have their own trailer, or is this done with a pool of shared trailers and vehicles? How do the drivers get their costs reimbursed? Are there club members who don’t fly and just do the driving?

Typically each glider has its own trailer. These are custom-built and a glider model A will not fit in a trailer built for model B. If it’s your personal aircraft you will tow the trailer to the field in the morning. Your car is left with the trailer, with the keys in it (somewhere). If you happen to land “out”, the retrieve crew will use your car (and thus, your petrol) to retrieve you. Unless you’ve made other arrangements of course. For club aircraft similar arrangements are typically made: Most glider pilots will anticipate this situation and will already have asked someone to come and get them if necessary.

The other thing is that thermal activity typically stops around dinnertime, so most outlandings happen around that time. This means that the retrieve crew will typically miss dinner at the club. So it’s more or less customary to treat the retrieve crew (typically two persons, but can be more in case of a heavy, complicated glider) to an alternative dinner (ie. Chinese).

More and more gliders also have what is called a “turbo”. This is a sustainer engine that cannot be used for take off, but is large enough for sustained flight, making it easy to get out of trouble. Instead of a largish 70 hp engine required for self launch, a “turbo” has a tiny 20 hp engine and a small propeller, can also be electric.

Peter wrote:

I did wonder how often someone does not manage to get back to base, and has to be picked up.

I would say it’s quite rare (it probably depends on where you’re flying). It’s not desirable and people tend to be afraid of it to some extent which then limits how far they venture in given conditions. Generally, you help each other. Because the next time, it could be you who needs retrieving. Cost is usually a dinner and a beer for all involved. You could obviously organize your own crew and this is handy on long tasks or in competitions because they can chase you and minimize the time needed for retrieve. Sometimes an aerotow retrieve is possible – if you land somewhere where a tug can land and take off again. Outlandings are more common in competitions because tactics come into play there and staying behind really isn’t an option.

This is why engines are so popular. But you might need a retrieve even when you have an engine. Although from what I’ve seen, in most cases when engine doesn’t do what you expected, it’s pilot’s fault. But it can fail and trying to start it low can lead to some interesting situations (you should never assume the engine will start and should assume the worst will happen – it will be stuck outside crippling your performance).

Peter wrote:

Does everyone with a glider have their own trailer, or is this done with a pool of shared trailers and vehicles?

Generally every glider has it’s own trailer in which it lives. Trailers are typically equipped to handle a particular model. If the gliders are similar enough, it might be doable in a pinch with care. But you won’t be able to put open class glider into a trailer for a standard class machine – you have different weight (there usually isn’t too much headroom so the suspension works properly), length, number of wing sections, etc. I can imagine a club feet which lives in a hangar where trailers are shared, but privately owned birds will have their own nests.

Peter wrote:

There needs to be a system in place for that. Does everyone with a glider have their own trailer, or is this done with a pool of shared trailers and vehicles? How do the drivers get their costs reimbursed? Are there club members who don’t fly and just do the driving?

It depends. Often you’ll just make an arrangement with another club member who’s not going on a cross country, and at some point you’ll make a reciprocal one. If you land out, they’ll likely drive your car and trailer to the site.

At some clubs your first cross country is a guaranteed outlanding – they expect you to fly it 50km then put it in a random field somewhere. I question this though, for me I’d land it at an airfield so I could get aerotowed out again! (I’ll gladly pay the fee for the towplane to come out to avoid having to make someone drive out there, de-rig the glider, and drive it back). When I was a member of the Soaring Club of Houston, if someone ended up in a farm field that was big enough we’d just land the towplane in that field and tow the glider out.

alioth wrote:

At some clubs your first cross country is a guaranteed outlanding – they expect you to fly it 50km then put it in a random field somewhere. I question this though, for me I’d land it at an airfield so I could get aerotowed out again!

Or you can get towed 50 km out and land back home. And your first cross country should be dual, so you can learn how to thermal (although 50 km in a modern glider isn’t much of a challenge, especially from highish aerotow – that’s IMHO downright trivial).

Late to the thread here but……..

Few people appreciate just how capable modern sailplanes are. I would regularly do 300 to 500 km on a good summers day in the UK. Southdown ( near shoreham ) up to lasham, past Brize Norton and Gloucester way then back across to south of Birmingham then up the west and home in time for a beer. There have been a few 1000km flights in the past couple of years in the UK.

In South Africa I did my diamond climb to over 25000’ one year and then the following year I managed to get to a little over 32000’ in wave off the Drakensberg. -20 outside, Tee shirt and Jeans, breath freezing on the inside of the canopy ……. one hell of a ride …. took over 30 minutes to get down with everything hung out in the breeze and sinking like a piano.

Best single leg I had was along a cloud street, dolphin flying ( no turning, just slowing down in the lift and speeding up in the sink ) for a little over 120km averaging over 160 kph. South African cloud street lift was 7m/s in places.Last ship I had, a Nimbus 3 Turbo had a 25.5m wingspan and an L/D of about 1:60. A high climb over Lasham to 6000’ would just get you home to Southdown with enough left for a high speed beat-up finish even if the sky was dead.

Glider pilots like to think we are superior ‘stick and rudder’ pilots, you do get to learn about energy conservation etc and the idea of deviating a few degrees off track to utilize the lift under a cloud street to climb faster is well worthwhile. Reading the sky and weather is an obvious skill. Regardless, we are just a nice bunch! :)

Just as an aside, on the subject of ‘standing around all day’, most, if not all of the clubs I have flown at ( South Africa, Spain, UK, Australia ) the entire operation is run by volunteers. Tug pilots are either Commercial pilots with thousands of hours guiding heavy metal or low time pilots working up their hours/cycles. They are not paid but volunteer their time. I have spent about 200 hours instructing ……. for free. The ground crews and flight line, duty officer of the day etc are all unpaid volunteers. It is a very different concept to the pitch-up-and-fly scenario common to GA.

Landing in remote fields ( something I became something of an expert in before buying a ‘turbo’ sustainer ) is almost a non-event. A good ploughed field will stop you in under 100 metres ( sometimes WELL under! ) A fallow field is usual though. ( Don’t land in fields with cows in, they are incredibly curious and will walk on wings etc. NEVER land in a field with a single cow …………. because it isn’t a cow it’s a bull! )

If you are flying a competition you will have arranged a ‘crew’ who would hitch up the trailer, drive out to the field, help you de-rig and put it back in the box then drive you home. You then re-rig ready for the next day, pilot retreats to his nice warm bed and the crew stays up to clean off the mud/dust and polish and prep the aircraft for the next day.

On a normal weekend though if you ‘fall down’ then a couple of blokes will hitch up your trailer, come out and ‘retrieve’ you in the same manner. It is customary for the unfortunate pilot to stand the drinks and a decent pub dinner in return.

As you can see, it’s different ethos entirely.

Nimbusgb wrote:

NEVER land in a field with a single cow …………. because it isn’t a cow it’s a bull!

There was an infamous incident in the US about 15 years or so ago when a bull decided it would “have its way” with a PW-5 that had landed in a field…