Jim Payne and Gordon Boettger both embarked on wave flights out of Minden, NV today, March 6, 2014. Jackie Payne has been blogging updates on Jim’s flight and Walt Rogers has been reporting Gordo’s progress on his blog. Both pilots are doing zig-zag flights between Minden, Susanville, and Mojave. Jim is flying with Dennis Tito in the latter’s DG-1000 and Gordo is flying a Duo Discus with co-pilot Mike Mitton.

Here’s the latest from Walt as we write…

Here’s Gordon Boettger’s DeLorme InReach track. The SSA Tracker site only shows his SPOT.

Jim Payne is also doing his zig-zag out of Minden.

We both discussed whether or not to conduct a downwind record for today. It was decided that too much cloud cover precip would prevent safe VFR flight past Elko, NV. Current conditions from Elko to Salt Lake City and Logan show BKN-OVC 11500-13000 up to 18,000 MSL with light precip in Utah and SW Wyoming. Click here for in-flight photos.

Check twitter for the latest updates: twitter.com/wrogersw .

Gordon’s flight is posted on Skylines.

Here’s Jackie’s report …

Jim and Dennis launched at sunrise this morning. It stopped pouring rain about an hour before daylight. Glad to get any moisture after such a dry winter. Lots of moisture, but lots of wind too. Had 11 knots of lift in first climb. About 400 km thus far but a short positioning leg to the south (40 km) will likely be dropped at end of day. Will likely be squeezed between Susanville and Bridgeport, but maybe Bishop if winds permit.

At the SSA convention I learned of a new way to automatically follow a pilot on the Glideport.aero website. If you register for free with them and “follow” a pilot then your email will receive a message anytime that pilot starts to fly. Directions and the starting link are below. You must be registered in order to follow.

At top right of map is a register link. It takes the email you give and a password (6 minimum characters) then sends you an activation email. My first activation msg was lost, but there is a “resend activation” button if you try to log in. The second message went to my spam folder since I had no previous comm with them. Click on activation link in email and you are in. (We experimented with this a few days ago and have not received any spam emails.) Once you you are in, go to US then Minden (or wherever you are interested in). Click on the arrow triangle to the right of Minden, not the words. Once the tracks are displayed then click on the tiny number to the right of JP’s info. Please use the one which lists altitude (in meters) and has a longer info data-line, that’s the inReach. I may start using the other one (SPOT for crewing and you probably don’t want a notification email for both.

There is supposed to be an SSA blog page where I could post in-flight updates (like Walt did, but not to the detail of his expertise) but I haven’t figured how to do that yet.

http://glideport.aero/map?p=GlidePort:472

Thinking wave,
Jackie

Wow! Both Jim and Gordo are ripping the Sierra wave. They are not flying together. They have almost identical speeds at 115 mph and are working the 17k altitude band. Jim and Dennis started earlier, so they have more distance.