We got in another day at Perry today, but I’m still waiting for a real ‘Perry Day’. The good news for today was we had clouds. The bad news was, we also had wind – lots of wind, and we had a high cirrus layer that came in later in the day and pretty much shut everything down around 4:30pm.
By grid time the wind was definitely a factor, but we were optimistic because the cloudbases were forecast to be around 5000′ and the B/S ratio was progged to be at 5 or above all day. The forecast high layer was in evidence way out to the west even as we were gridding up, and it was definitely coming our way. We crossed our collective fingers and hoped it wouldn’t be too thick (and it wasn’t, at least not right away).
Launch got going quicker than yesterday, so all classes were up and all gates were open by 2pm. Gliders started streaming out pretty quickly in the hopes of getting around before things shut down. The task was interesting, at least for 15/18. It was a ‘long MAT’ task, something I tried for the first time last year when I CD’d our CCSC regional (Region 6 South). The idea is to construct a MAT task with enough mandatory turnpoints so it will be difficult to get around them all in the minimum time. If the day gets stronger, pilots can always add turnpoints of their choosing after all the mandatory ones, and if it gets weaker, pilots are free to cut the task short and come home at any point. If minimum distance has been achieved, then the pilot gets ‘speed’ points, possibly modified if the pilot gets home under the minimum time. The result is essentially an Assigned Task that can be shortened at the pilot’s option. In this case, the task was east to Orangeburg, then south to Barnwell, then north to Gilbert, then southwest to Aiken, then home. The total distance around all turnpoints was approximately 150 miles, and the min time was 2.5 hours. This translates to about 60mph if a pilot goes all the way around in just at the min time. As the task developed, the high cirrus started to impinge on ground heating about halfway through the task, so things got pretty soft. Almost all pilots in the 15/18 class wound up faced with an interesting choice after the Gilbert turnpoint. If they skipped the Aiken turn, they could go directly south back to Perry with relative ease, but would arrive well under the minimum time. However, if they continued toward Aiken, they would have to contend with softening conditions and the possibility of a landout. I decided to take a “Sporting Risk” (see Brigliadori’s book) and go for the Aiken turnpoint. As it turned out, it wasn’t terribly difficult, but it was slow, so it might have been better to zoom directly back to Perry and take the under-time arrival – who knows?
Wingman John Mittell and Francois Pin arranged to fly as a team today, but got bollixed up when the required hand-held radio in John’s cockpit was unfortunately left in an inaccessible position with the ON/OFF switch in the OFF position. I hate it when that happens!
Erik Nelson and John Cochrane also flew as a team today, and apparently did well. Erik reported that everything went well until just before Aiken when Erik got low and John got high, at which point they mutually agreed that team flying was over for the day. John wound up doing well for the day, and Erik wound up back with the rest of us ‘also-rans’ :-(.
Yikes – I just discovered I had not actually published yesterday’s post – so I did that just a few minutes ago, and I’m following it with this one to catch up – sorry about that!
Popular weather forecast is calling for a weakening front to push through overnight with some chance of rain, but it appears that it won’t be anything spectacular. Tomorrow is expected to be at least partly sunny with a high near 75 and north winds 8-13mph. ‘Partly sunny’ in weather-speak usually means ‘mostly cloudy’, so I’m not sure how optimistic or pessimistic to be. A quick glance at XCSkies indicates that if we are going to get a day in tomorrow, it will be late and short – bummer.
Stay tuned,
Frank
