Rand (NN) in his LS8

Friends, it’s been a looonnnnggg day for Bill and me. We left home this morning at 6:10 enroute to Philadelphia via Charlotte, NC. We were delayed four hours in Charlotte while ground crews in Philly worked furiously to remove the 15″ of snow that fell on the city Wednesday night. But it wasn’t all bad. One of our good soaring buddies just happens to be Chief Pilot for USAir in Charlotte and generously offered us the sanctity and comfort of the large conference room attached to his office in the terminal. We relaxed and talked soaring until our departing flight began boarding. Thanks Skip!!

We arrived at the conference hotel just in time to hear the closing remarks of the last scheduled speaker for the day, Prof. emeritus Ward Hindman, who gave a talk about OSTIV, which is the international scientific and technical organization for soaring. OSTIV hosts a biennial symposium concurrently with the World Gliding Championships and publishes papers presented at this and other OSTIV meetings in its quarterly journal, Technical Soaring. To subscribe to Technical Soaring or to learn more about OSTIV, visit their website at http://www.ostiv.fai.org.

OSTIV has sponsored a dinner and speaker at the past few SSA conventions and this year’s conference is no exception. Unfortunately, Danny Howell, the scheduled speaker, is ill and was unable to be here. Fortunately, OSTIV president Loek Boermans,, Prof. Mark Maughmer, and Dan Armstrong team-tagged to fill in for Danny.

The talk was about the design and flight characteristics of Howell’s Lighthawk sailplane, which was designed to meet the U.S. Light Sport Aircraft certification standards. The original Lighthawk, which first flew in 2002, is a 15 meter composite sailplane with a low empty weight. Howell’s goal was to build a glider with a low minimum sink rate (~1 foot per second) at a low speed, and good handling qualities. As Loek pointed out in his introduction, research into the microdynamics of convection within a few hundred meters of the ground has revealed streams and currents of lift that are not organized into bubbles or columns as are conventional thermals. A light sailplane like the Lighthawk is designed to exploit lift in this regime. Mark Maughmer gave an overview of the aerodynamic design of the Lighthawk and the theoretical performance of an 18 meter version. Dan Armstrong concluded the presentation with a description of early Lighthawk test flights and his experience flying the Carbon Dragon. The Dragon is an ultralight sailplane of lesser performance than the Lighthawk, but capable of exploring the same kind of microdynamic lift. U.S. pilot Gary Osoba has made many long distance, low altitude flights in the Carbon Dragon using soaring techniques commonly described as ‘dynamic soaring.’

Well, that’s all for now. Tomorrow’s schedule is full of interesting talks, so I should have a much wider variety of topics to include in Friday’s blog.