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.

Fun flying at the farm

The wind on the hill was S-WSW today, so just before lunch we headed up from some tandem flights. Phil was first...

...and after launching we hung around a bit in the patchy lift before the wind swung slightly more to the west and mostly just blew along the ridge.

We landed, did the vehicle shuffle, and Heather was ready for the next flight.

The wind had picked up a little, and she was lighter than Phil, so pretty much as soon as I pulled the wing up she was lifted off the ground.

I tried to run forwards but was lifted into the air after a few paces as the wing started flying slowly forwards.

The slope at the top of the hill is a very gentle one, and although we touched down briefly once we were soon in the air flying out from the launch.

There was more lift during this flight and we climbed above launch height as we (slowly) headed out from the hill before landing in the valley.

Next a short flight with Phil from the top (wind had picked up slightly more, had difficulty controlling the wing while checking lines before we were attached) but once in the air it was all good. We got above launch and flew along the ridgeline some before landing on the top of the ridge further down (near the farm truck for an easy retrieve).

The wind had slowly increased still more and I decided to leave it for a while.

As the sun started to get low I headed back up with Dad for a final check and we arrived on launch to find the wind strength perfect but the direction slighty cross. Fine for launching, but the direction was the similiar to earlier in the day and just 10-15degrees more to the south would have caused a mega lift band out the front of the hillface, rather than small, ever changing patches of lift swinging around the peak of the hill and windy sink to fly through in front of the hill to get over the flats to the house.

The view on launch was amazing - the sun was about 15min from setting, the massive clouds deeper in the mountains were golden pink hues - half of the horizon looked like a movie set backdrop or a photoshopped postcard!

We launched into the smooth evening air and found the lift better than we expected - by soaring the crown of the hill we got up to 650m as the sun dipped down to touch the horizon and slip slowly over the edge.

The lift eased off and we slowly flew out from the hill, over the flats and down to land in front of the house. It wasn't a long flight, we didn't go very far, or high, or achieve any of the other big numbers that often make up a great flight - but it was great nonetheless.
The smoothness of the air, the sound of the wind in the lines, the unfamiliar viewpoint of familiar places in the last light of evening- combine that with the thrill of flying with my Dad (we've flown together before, but never as good a flight as this from the hill) and it all added up to pure magic. All the difficulties of paragliding become insignificant and forgotten when days and flights like this are possible!

Soaring at Mt Oates

I rushed up the hill when I noticed that the wind was blowing pretty much right on the face at a soaring strength (very rare except just before a thunderstorm hits). Didn't get much height as I flew away from launch until I got out over the main face, then the lift was good with a nice wide lift band.
Some pics...

Take-off is the bare patch on top of the hill (plenty of room hey?) in the center of the pic.

Looking down the valley...

Recently repaired dam (wall damaged by flooding, we cleaned years of accumulated silt out of the bottom as well).