I’m writing this post early, as I’ll be on the road as soon as possible today after we either fly or not, however it works out. The weather forecast today is for clear and blue, but not very flyable – maybe 300 fpm (raw) to 3300′ msl, woohoo! ;-). However, I *did* just watch Baud Litt (LBL) go by with his trailer on his way to assemble, so things can’t be entirely bleak. However, as the contest weatherman, he may feel compelled to put the very best face on things ;-)
This morning’s reveille was provided at about 7 am by Leigh Smith. He first taxied his A36 Bonanza up to the main hangar (about 10′ from my bed), and *washed* his airplane! Then he fired that mother up again and taxied away, and took off for parts unknown. I sure hope wherever he was going was very important, because I was really enjoying that dream!
This morning after my run I got the chance to talk to Clay Monroe (5K). Clay got low in the high ground west of the airport yesterday, and couldn’t connect to the main gaggle’s thermal. By the time he realized this, he was too low to make it safely back to the airport (which he couldn’t see due to the intervening Liberty Ski hill), so he elected to put his glider down safely in a nice field just north of Main Street in downtown metropolitan Fairfield (population 507). We all accused him of just needing a good cup of coffee at the Book & Table, but we all also congratulated him on picking a good field and landing safely rather than trying a death-defying (and sometimes death-causing) return to the field.
Clay also has another claim to fame here at the airport, as he is the proud owner of a ‘nano-castle’ – a popup camper that fits onto the top of his vehicle, and is reachable only by a collapsible ladder.
It’s nowhere near as nice as my Micro-Castle, but on the other hand it costs about 1/7 the price, is much lighter, and Clay was able to get it by the Monroe Finance Committee (aka Mrs. Monroe).
After this contest ends, so does my RL soaring season for 2012. I’m off tonight to M&H Soaring where I’ll drop TA off for some much needed TLC, and then it’s into non-flying storage until March and the Seniors. This was an off year for me, only 9 contests (the Uvalde WGC wiped out all the normal Texas contests, and scheduling conflicts claimed a couple more). Of all the contests I flew this year, the CCSC XC Camp/Regional and Dansville Regionals were by far the best – we flew 12 out of 14 possible days at CCSC, and 6 out of 7 at Dansville. Cordele was a complete rainout, and the others (Seniors, Perry, Ionia, Mifflin, Fairfield, New Castle) were somewhere in between. It has been a great season, and I’m looking forward to even more RL soaring next year.
Now my trailer goes into the trailer barn at CCSC, my camper goes into my garage, and I go into my home office/Condor flight center to start my Condor flying/instruction season. This season I hope to take several students through the entire XC curriculum I outlined in a recent Condor Corner article in Soaring, and do a lot of competitive Condor flying myself. Sean/Tiffany Fidler and I are also planning to host at least two 4-day (2 races each day of a weekend) Condor contests – one during the Thanksgiving holiday, and one between Xmas and New Year’s day. We hope to be able to use the regular SSA contest website for contestant registrations, results, and reporting, so reader can continue to get ‘contest fixes’ over the winter months as well! ;-).
One last footnote for the 2012 season. No wrapup would be complete without mentioning the big advance in safety that occurred with the long-awaited introduction of FLARM to the U.S. fleet. The introduction actually started last year at the Uvalde pre-worlds, but we didn’t have enough gliders with FLARMs to really make a difference until this season. Starting at the Seniors in March, FLARM started saving lives – including my own a number of times (see my post from the Seniors about a classic double blind-spot converging course collision situation that was averted between me and Dave Pixton (9X). It was at the Seniors where we also first started getting real evidence of the RF interference (RFI) problem that significantly reduced detection range (Dave Pixton wasn’t alerted of my presence even though we were only about 100 yds away), but the FLARM folks took this seriously and had a solution in place by the time the ‘brick’ version was introduced at Mifflin. Here at the last contest of the season in Fairfield, almost all the FAI class gliders have FLARM, and the improvement in safety is significant. We had a ridge day yesterday, and it was really helpful to know about head-on or overtaking traffic. On the way out to the ridge yesterday up near cloud base along a cloud street, I got an alert of danger-close overtaking traffic so I started rocking my wings to make myself more visible. In a few seconds I saw the other glider as it pulled abreast (it was Karl Striedieck) and we waved at each other, but who knows if he would have seen me against the cloud background without FLARM? After flying last night, I heard lots of comments like “wow, FLARM saved my ass today on the ridge – I had 3 gliders coming at me head-on, and I couldn’t see anything due to sun glare!”. If you don’t have a FLARM unit and you fly in contests – get one before next season starts. I plan to lobby the SSA to make FLARM mandatory for all national contests next year, and for ALL contests starting in 2014, and I hope anyone who is reading this and/or has seen the FLARM light will do the same.
Stay tuned,
Frank (TA)
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