New wing!

I've got a new wing! It's a Niviuk Artik3 and it's great!

Eulogy of an Aspen 2
The Gradient Aspen 2 finally started showing signs of the many hours it has spent in the blazing sun, carrying me safely for miles and miles of xc flying (also the abuse it's copped in the ground-handling paddock, tow paddock, and some pretty average launches). I flew distance PB's on it (150km, and 300km), did my first full stalls on it, got sucked into clouds by accident and purpose, achieved many season goals (not get injured this season - for almost five years, fly from Bright to home, Mystic to Hotham, Mystic to the Mt Buffalo Horn, over the Mt Buffalo plateau, Feathertop to Mt Beauty via the Northwest Spur, Feathertop to Buffalo Village to Mt Beauty, return from the Kiewa Valley via Tawonga Gap, and many more...). I've flown in some big, scary air on it, but very rarely felt insecure. So many times I've flown further, longer because I've picked up a climbed up off to one side because of the great feedback from it.
But shortly after reaching the 400hr mark the performance started degrading quite quickly and noticeably. I was preventing an increasing number of frontals (and it hardly ever frontalled) and asymmetric (which were taking more work to pop out), the sink rate was increasing and the glide rate decreasing....  Clearly, it was time for it to retire - besides, 400hrs is pretty good for a wing! Thanks for a great wing, Jiri!


I'd pretty much decided to get a Niviuk wing, as it would make changing from the solo to the tandem much easier (when switching between Niviuk & Gradient I'd almost always turn away from the thermals for the first 10min or so...) and had flown the Artik3 twice before (2.5hrs) and really liked it. I hesitated a bit, mostly because it was 18months old and a lot has happened glider technology wise in that time (shark nose intakes, 7-lines-per-side EN C & B's, better profiles and weight distribution methods, etc), but after taking one up again it was just so much fun that I decided to go for it. 
I had been flirting with the idea of trying the Peak3 (2 line, EN D) as it was due out any day, but in the end decided that since I'm not a comp pilot, and average around 100hrs a year (including tandems), and the recent EN C's were so good... I'd rather fly something a bit safer, and hopefully feel comfortable enough to keep flying on the wild days - than be running my safety margin past zero as soon as the air starts getting chunky!

I've towed with it, launched in really windy conditions, and flown in some pretty ratty conditions, and I'm rapidly gaining the confidence in it that I had in the Aspen. So far it's turned very little in collapses, is noticeably more collapse resistant, 2-3km's faster on trim (doesn't sound like much, but you really notice it!) and way faster on 2nd bar. The brake pressure is higher and thermalling with it is quite different - I think a lot because of the increase in aspect ratio and greater wing loading. Most thermalling seems to be more of a two part sequence - first roll the wing, then pitch up into the turn. The wing feels like it has a much higher wing loading (but it doesn't) and flies much more homogeneously, more like a single 'wing' and less like an inflated shape than can blow apart easily...
Initially I was getting pulled off my feet on windy launches, but once I started moving smartly towards the wing as I pulled it up that all stopped, and I've since launched it without problems in wind just a couple of km's/hr below the trim speed. Behaves welll, and once it's in the air - I usually catch myself grinning involuntarily a couple of minutes into the first climb...

I'm keen to see how the 2013/2014 flying season pans out - what with the Sup'Air Delight harness, LK8000 flight computer, UHF radio, VHF radio, and all the bit's and pieces I carry around in my flight deck - if I don't make some good flights by the end of next summer it won't be the equipment holding me back!

Congratulations Sebastian!!

Yesterday, Sebastian Benz flew further in a paraglider, in Australia, than anyone else ever has.
Here's a screenshot of his SPOT path.

He towed up from just north of Deniliquin, into what sounds like a fairly uninspiring sky (high cirrus), didn't get anything on tow, went on glide and was about to land when he found a climb that he started working.... As the day went on the cirrus burned off, the cu's started popping, base rose, and the wind picked up. He kept working north to clear airspace and mountains, and landed around 360km's later...
An awesome effort!!!

Two recent flights of note

Well, I haven't been here in a while, but I thought I'd log two interesting flights from yesterday.
The first flight was very short, and really didn't go the way I'd envisioned it. You can watch it here (it's not long!)



There's no video for the second flight, and my XC Trainer screwed up the tracklog so even the Leonardo log shows less than half of it, but you can download the google earth kmz of it for GE viewing. Here's a GE screenshot.
















Flight #1
This is the first time I've been under my reserve (I guess I can still say that I haven't deployed my reserve...), if you watch closely you can see the passenger gripping the handle as I pull the wing up (you can also hear the velcro rip loose). He drops it as I turn and we run off the hill. While I remain upright the reserve sits in the container - as soon as I start sitting back in the harness it tips out and deploys.
Due to the steep slope we landed on, some springy pine branches from a felled pine tree, the large light-weight reserve, and our airbag harnesses, we landed a lot gentler than it looks like on the video. No damage to passenger, pilot, or equipment.
It took about 2hrs to get everything back up to launch, walk back down and hunt around until we found the reserve container (very close to where we came down), untangle lines, do a cell-by-cell inspection of the wing, inflate it several times to check for other damage, repack the reserve, and convince another pilot to fly with me.

Flight #2
Wally was the brave volunteer, we launched and climbed out nicely (no noticeable damage to the wing). We left Mystic when the climb slowed down and headed for Goldmine, took a thermal there most of the way to base, then headed off down Reliance Ridge.
It was a long, sinky glide, but right at the end we flew into a thermal and climbed again. Once we'd topped out we headed towards Bungalow Spur (at the base of Mt Feathertop), but it was sinky going and we diverted to a newly forming cloud along the way. This allowed us to arrive over the base of the spur with good height, which we slowly used up as we meandered around in patchy broken lift and sink. Eventually a good climb came through and kicked us up (tight cores, had to really crank in 'em), from there we pushed further up and in, climbing to base before making the glide in over the summit.
It was quite cold up high, and Wally was unfortunately wearing shorts.... so we tried to limit our time up high somewhat....
While climbing we'd noticed a SW wind up high, so we continued North past Mt Feathertop (towards Stoneytop) and then NW down the Freeburg Spur. The clouds were slowly developing and merging over the high plains, but it was a classic looking sky and the clouds were all working.
We climbed again (Westerly wind now, which was unfortunate as it would mean a headwind back to Mystic), and went on glide back towards Reliance. Despite pushing headwind (trimmers mostly off) we got a good glide and turned towards Mystic. We flew through several thermals but didn't bother turning, and once we got close to Goldmine we put big-ears on. We were still going to overshoot the LP, so Wally held the big-ears tabs down until we had just the center 15 or so cells open, and that and some handy sink degraded our glide enough to glide into the LP in time for afternoon tandems.

This is the second time I've flown my Takoo 2 over Mt Feathertop, and the first time I've taken it up the Northern ridge towards Mt Beauty. If you're looking for an awesome tandem wing, get the Takoo 2 - launches well, flies really well, great landing flare.

Here's a pic of the tandem in front of Mt Feathertop, climbing before heading in over the summit. This wasn't from the flight with Wally, but an earlier on. Taken by super-pilot Ollie, who seems to be flying out of Feathertop (or past it coming back from Hotham) nearly every time I've been in there recently!

500hrs!

I've just been updating my flight logbook (it's an excel spreadsheet these days) and noticed that I have spent over 500 hours paragliding! Woohoo!!
I remember reading some articles about skill level and time spent doing an activity - a rule-of-thumb number I came across several times was that people approach 'master-craftsman' level sometime after 10,000 hrs... Which echo's my feeling of - there's still heaps and heaps to learn!

One advantage of the excel logbook is it can be stored online (google documents, hotmail skydrive, etc), another is that with a little organisation it's easy to pull various statistics out of it. A good winter time-waster....

Some of the numbers that I thought were interesting were:

30hrs of sleddies!
Less than 30hrs of coastal flying (novice!)
Very similar amount of time spent flying sport (free) tandems to instructional (paying) tandems.
While less than 20% of my flights have been xc flights, over 60% of my airtime has been flying xc - more than 3,200km of xc km's flown.

The photo was taken a few days ago at The Pines - a great ridge soaring site (especially in a SSE - which it was the other day!) & also a good thermic site (I flew my first 100km's from here in 2007). It's apparently the rim of an extinct volcano.

Smooth tandem flying weather

Pretty gentle flying conditions today - a bit of a late start and the thermals around Mystic weren't stronger than 3m/s. Very smooth conditions made it ideal weather for flying with friends. A fun day!

Extending the tandem envelope

I had an interesting tandem yesterday - might as well jot it down.

Peter was keen to experience paragliding but he's (probably) well into his sixties and has an arthritic knee which was causing him to limp somewhat when he showed up at the meeting place. He's also a fairly solid guy - taller than me and weighting a good deal more.

I always worry more with older passengers - their bones are more brittle (sometimes very brittle indeed) and it just takes longer to process and react to things. It's also unlikely they are able to run very well for the launch and landing, and extra care needs to be taken to land them softly.

Fortunately, it was a nice North-Easterly day at Bright, so around lunch time we went up the hill. The cycles were starting to come through pretty regularly, and soon pilots were staying up and climbing above the hill. I briefed Peter on the launch and was getting a good vibe from him - he seemed pretty switched on - clipped him into the lowest loop on the spreader bar, checked the wind in the LP, waited for the peak of a cycle (more wind = less running for Peter), and pulled the Takoo2 up.

This glider is very new, and while I really like the Takoo, the '2' just seems to do everything a little better. Sure enough he only had to take a couple of steps and we were off the hill, heading left towards the house thermal "Marcus". Once I had Peter settled in his harness and comfortable I worked on connecting with a climb. I could feel the effect of the extra weight, both through extra wind noise and sink-rate, and the amount of extra effort it took to turn the glider.

After figure-of-eighting for an uncomfortable time (for me) down low on the ridge, we gained enough height to circle in the lift and soon climbed up towards cloud base, then flew out over the town, crossed a spur on the other side of the valley, and glided down to land.

Before takeoff we'd checked that the wind was blowing nicely up-valley to make the landing as slow and soft as possible, and I loitered around in lifty areas until I saw the windsock straighten out up-valley (indicating a thermal lifting off behind the LP and sucking air across the LP) before going down. I got Peter to stay in the harness during our approach, and lift his legs up when we were within a couple of meters of the ground. Because he was in the lowest hang-point he was sitting only a bit higher than my feet, so I flared for my feet (great flare on the Takoo2, landing into a nice breeze helped) and he sat down on the airbag from about 20cm up.

The launch and landing were a piece of cake for him, and he deeply enjoyed the flying so overall he was pretty happy. I'd been most worried about the landing (but also the launch), which had gone smoothly and trouble free, but I'd also really enjoyed the flying so I was happy too!

A good reminder that the right conditions and planning can turn a potentially dangerous flight into a safe and enjoyable flight.

-pic taken by Hamish Barker

Downloading and viewing GPS tracks from Aircotec XC Trainer

Downloading Tracks

1. Get the latest version of GPS Dump & install it.
2. Connect your XCTrainer to the computer via the USB-miniUSB lead (or the serial lead through a USB adapter).
3. For Windows, find out which port it's using by going to Control Panel / System (you may need to go to Advanced System Settings) / Hardware / Device Manager / Ports / USB Serial Port. For Mac, click on the Apple logo / About this Mac / More Information / Hardware /
4. Open GPSDump and set the correct COM Port in the Misc / Set COM Port menu
5. On the Aircotec, go to the flights folder, select the flight you want to upload, hit send, decide your level of detail (1sec track interval gives the nicest looking tracks) and be ready to hit send
6. On GPSDump, press XC Trainer, you should see "waiting for data" or something similar
7. Send the track from the XCT (1 sec interval for best resolution), you should see numbers counting down or up on the XCT and GPS Dump.
8. Save as a .IGC file

If, like me, you have an older XCT with no mini USB port you probably need to install the driver for a Prolific Chip USB Serial Adapter PL2303. Try here first, if it's not working google it and try a few other versions - you'll get one that works soon.

I've gotten tracks off my XCT and Gamin GPS's with GPS Dump running on OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows XP & 7 running on a virtual box inside Linux. It's not very intuitive, but it does work well when you get the settings right.

Viewing Tracks

For viewing the tracks I prefer Google Earth. Convert the tracks from .IGC files to .KMZ (so Google Earth can read 'em) files with GPS Visualizer (GPS Dump will also do it, but it doesn't look nearly as pretty :)

My favorite settings (Track Options, view advanced options) are:

* Altitude Mode - Absolute (for flights)
* Draw a shadow - 40% opacity
* Track width - 2
* Colorize track by - Altitude/Elevation
* Default color - Blue
* Spectrum direction - Up

Click Create KML file, download the file from the link that pops up after a couple of minutes, then open in Google Earth and geek out!

Another really cool thing to do in Google Earth is use the filter in the Leonardo Flight Database to isolate flights from the launch and xc distance of a flight you'd like to do, download other pilots xc flights and view them. You can learn heaps from this - where they climbed out from, how much height they head before big crossings (and if it worked or not), where they went afterwards, how much wind there was (drift of their climbs), etc.