John Mittell (BZ) and I have been flying together in Condor for the last three months or so.  John flew with me in Condor a time or two last winter as part of my normal winter Condor instruction series, and then we met up in RL at the 2012 Seniors contest.  After that he came to our highly successful XC camp and regionals at CCSC where he showed a lot of improvement in his XC flying.

We got the idea of team flying from the team flying camp scheduled for Chilhowee between the two regional contest weekends.  We both planned to attend the regional and the camp, so we decided to try team flying in Condor as a way of preparing for the Chilhowee camp.  As it turned out, I wound up not going down to Chilhowee due to the poor weather outlook, but John and I decided that the team flying thing was so much fun that we would keep going in Condor just to see what would happen.

I had previously done some team flying with Gary Carter (HK) last year at the Uvalde pre-worlds, and from that formed the opinion that team flying was “a real good way to ruin an XC flight” – it was just too hard to stay together, and once separated, impossible to reunite.  Moreover, the time and mental energy required to stay together seemed to detract significantly from the primary mission – flying fast.

Team flying in Condor is every bit as hard as in RL, with a few notable exceptions;

• a FLARM-like display of other gliders on a moving map (typically restricted to just 1 mile range) helps pilots to stay together
• The logistics of getting together to fly are MUCH easier – BZ lives in Alabama and I live in Ohio, but physical distance is all but meaningless in Condor-land
• The certain knowledge that retrieves are a piece of cake!

After a few months and maybe 50 hours of flying together, both BZ and I believe we have learned a lot about team flying techniques and tactics in a racing environment, and that what we are learning can be applied to RL with very little transfer loss.  And if the transfer isn’t perfect – so what?  We fly together more in a month than most teams do in a year, and we do it in every imaginable location with weather from crappy to spectacular.  Try that in RL! ;-).

After team finishes of 1/2 or 2/3 in several races over the last few weeks, I was personally getting a bit cocky about our team flying prowess, but today’s race (flight plan attached) took my ego down a couple of notches and really got my attention.  We were flying in the Czechoslovakia 2.0 scenery with open class gliders, and the weather was pretty good – about 6000-7000′ msl cloud bases with 6-8kt average climbs.  There were about 25 mostly European pilots competing in the race, and when all the dust settled, BZ and TA were well down in the standings, with about  875 points.   Our average speed was very good – about 84mph, but the day winner clocked in at about 91mph – wow!

Open class race in the Czechoslovakia 2.0 scenery

John and I independently analyzed the race using SeeYou, and John pointed out that our task average climb rate was almost 1 kt higher  (6.4 vs 5.5) but the day winner’s average on course cruise speed was 10-15mph faster than ours – ouch!

In a discussion later in the day, we agreed that my insistence on a conservative ‘block’ speed was probably the culprit.  Even though we climbed better and cruised more efficiently than the day winner, he simply outran us on the cruise portions.  After some more discussion, we decided that my block speed approach was OK, but that it had to be adjusted for the markedly better Uvalde-like conditions on this day; when the actual achieved climb rates were more than about 2 time the MC setting associated with the normal block cruise speed, then that should trigger a readjustment.  In this case, we were cruising at between 80 and 90kts, which was consistent with a MC setting of about 2.5 for our fully-ballasted Nimbus 4’s.  However, our task average climb rate was about 6.4kts, well over twice the block speed MC.

So, we decided to take advantage of another cool feature of Condor-land, and go fly the same exact task again (with exactly the same weather), but fly it at 100-110kt (consistent with an MC setting of about 3.7-3.9) cruise instead of 80-90 and see how it worked.   The second time around I averaged about 92 mph, slightly higher than the actual day-winner, but BZ fell in a hole and came in significantly slower.   The higher cruise speed did the trick, but it also made it harder to (as BZ puts it) ‘maintain unit cohesion’, and ultimately contributed to BZ getting scraped off on some high ground.

All in all, these two flights were a great learning experience for both of us.  The initial flight showed us that we were missing something important, and the second flight allowed us to test our theory about what went wrong with the first flight under essentially identical conditions, and to internalize the lesson right away.  It is hard to stress this second point strongly enough – the ability to  fly a task a second (or third, or …) time in essentially identical conditions allows a pilot and/or team to experiment with different theories/factors in a controlled way, without having the experiment invalidated by changing weather conditions, and without having to wait days/weeks/months to try the experiment.

For those readers who might be interested in the underlying data for this post, I have attached a ZIP file (121004_Czech_Open) containing the following files:

• The Condor flight plan for the race
• The IGC file for the day winner
• My ‘before’ and ‘after’ IGC files

Frank (TA)