Condor and Minden

I got an email from Aaron,  fellow pilot and Condor flyer, after his return from a recent flying vacation to Minden, NV.  Aaron didn’t have any mountain, ridge, or wave experience prior to his arrival there, but he did the soaring equivalent of “But I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express” – he prepped for his adventure by flying the Minden scenery in Condor.  For “the rest of the story, here are Aaron’s own words, along with links to videos he shot while there.

As a side-note, I did much the same thing when preparing for the 15m nationals at Logan, and I’m VERY glad that I did ;-).

 

Hi Frank,

I met you at an Ann Arbor airport Condor get together a few months ago.
Thought you might be interested in a recent experience I had.

I took my first trip to Minden a few weeks ago.  Never soloed in wave, ridge
conditions or mountains of any kind for that matter.

To prepare, I spent quite a bit of time flying Condor in the Minden area.  I
downloaded the waypoints from the Worldwide Turnpoint Exchange, and dumped
them into XCSoar on my Droid via WiFi to Condor.  I tried and was successful
at wave flights and ridge flights.  My brother Kor (from Vermont) set up a
server and we flew tasks together in the area.  I downloaded wave flights
from OLC to see where they connected to the wave.  I watched videos, and
read all the docs and airport ops data on SoaringNV’s web site.

Bottom line.  I felt very comfortable with the area as soon as I arrived
real world.  My instructor made a comment to the effect that. “he knows this
place better than I do”

Just another example how Condor can be really useful.

… Aaron

P.S. got a wave flight to 17.5 on Jan 14th. (see OLC).  Had an amazing ridge
flight in almost no wind.

Photos here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/73650057@N06/sets/721576290143

Videos here:

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