FOOTLAUNCHAUGUST

Where’s that Azores high then?

 

Have we got news for you! No, not really. Dross aplenty though…

Next club meeting; was had at the Pheasant in Welland. An unofficial one as it’s the holiday month. But for all that it was interesting and stimulating and Bryan dished out hats to all and sundry.

 

If you think of Australia as wall to wall flying weather then think again.  Simon is going on about kangaroos this month. Fits in with the general defocused way this ‘magazine’ covers the sport anyhow.

Safe flying, Richard

SAFETY MATTERS and other stuff

(More wit and wisdom from TC – apart from the next bit as he isn’t self obsessed enough to do it himself)

 

Tim Crow!

The most effectual PG.

 Who's intellectual close friends get to call him T.C. Providing it's with dig-i-nity.

Tim Crow!

An indisputable member of the committee.

 He's not the boss, he's a safety officer and he may do championships. Does the occasional most tip top, XC.

Tim Crow!

Yes he's not a chief, he's not a king, But he’s usually above everything, He's the most tip top,

Tim Crow!

 

Did you ever wonder?

Why isn't the number 11 pronounced onety-one?

How important does a person have to be before they are considered

assassinated instead of just murdered?

If a 999 operator has a heart attack, whom does he/she call?

Why does a round pizza come in a square box?

If we're here to help other people, what are the other people here for?

Why is it called "after dark" when it is really "after light"?

Is it good if a vacuum really sucks?

Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

Why do we say "Something is out of whack". What is a whack?

Why do "Tug" boats "Push their barges?

Does the reverse side also have a reverse side?

Why do people who know the least know it the loudest?

Have you ever seen a toad on a toadstool?

How did a fool and his money get together in the first place?

If man evolved from monkeys and apes, why do we still have monkeys and

apes?

 

 

Hang Gliding reminiscences

August 1991. Sean from New Zealand and I went down to fly an inter-club competition at the Southern Club sites. Saturday saw us doing a late XC from Devil’s Dyke to land at Lewes at about 6pm.

 

Sunday morning greeted us with blue skies and a very light nwly drift. By 11 we had rigged our Rumours and were waiting on top of the Dyke for someone to do something. There was no wind to speak of. Four pilots in front took off to chase some swifts screeching in front of the hill. Three went down but the other was just hanging in weak rough looking lift. I made the decision to go and ran off the hill heading straight for the remaining glider 200 metres away. As I reached him my vario started to bleep and I circled hard right noticing around three other gliders had followed me and were heading my way. I just concentrated hard on the lift knowing that any indecision or lack of will would quickly see me back on the ground. Each turn the lift became stronger and more ordered and soon I was at a few hundred feet and saw that a few of the gliders were bottom landing and a few were circling up below me. Sean was in the bottom field, which was a shame. Five minutes later I was at three thousand feet directly above take off looking across at a wall of cloud formed by the sea breeze front. Anyone still on the ground would now have to take off with a tail wind.

 

I turned the glider eastwards and paralleled the line of cloud, the base of which was now well below me and I could see Brighton through the occasional gaps. After a few miles the cloud vanished so I headed in a more northerly direction so as to stay on the ‘good’ side of the front. I arrived about 1000’ above Ditchling Beacon but had found no lift. I could hear the faint chug of a tractor working the fields below me when my attention was drawn to the warbling of my vario. It was a weak affair of the type were you gain a bit and lose a bit but I thought it was worth staying with and eventually my circling paid off with a climb of around 500’ before it petered out. I headed off again not knowing if I was in or out of the sea air. I flew over Plumton racecourse and onto the flat weald north of Lewes. I crossed the A275 with only 4-500’ above the ground before I found one final thermal above the River Ouse. It was rough and scrappy again and I had to heave the glider about to stay in the best bits, flying without much finesse in order to chase the best bits. After ten minutes I felt tired and was no higher than when I started.  I glided of again and eventually spotted a likely looking field to land in near Ringmer. As I lined up for a landing I noticed a very grand looking house surrounded by large trees with a haha overlooking the field at the edge of the grounds. My landing wasn’t the best but with nothing bent I carried the glider to the edge of the field, took off my sweat-soaked flying suit and started to derig. A group of people appeared at the haha and invited me over for some lunch. They were obviously rich and a little tipsy so I went and joined them for some summer pudding and a glass of wine while I waited for Sean after leaving a phone message with my girlfriend back home as to my whereabouts (mobile phones were for rich people in 1991)  Sean turned up in my Citroen GS around 5pm and we set off for home in Oxfordshire only to lose all hydraulic fluid from the suspension when a bracket holding one of the suspension spheres cracked just as we were going down the driveway.  We arrived back in Wantage at 5:30am Monday morning in my girlfriend’s friend’s 2CV along with my girlfriend and her friend, a medium sized dog and all our hang gliding gear – some Citroens are better than others.

 

Chucky (brackets egg)

 

Dear Doreen,

Do you have a problem? I think you do! C’mon, you know you want to. Ask me anything – yes anything! 

 

 

Dear Doreen,

I like to sing when I’m flying. I can’t see anything wrong in this but I’ve been told that it may annoy others – especially the passengers. How could this be?

 

Yours truly

Captain Lewis Bonafide

 

Dear Lewis

Why don’t you try a duet with the co-pilot or maybe do a ‘round’ with the passengers? Best not choose London’s Burning if you are heading into Heathrow though.

I hope this helps, Doreen

 

 

Dear Doreen,

Let me get one thing straight at the outset: I am not anti laminar flow. For the record, laminar flow is great! However, I am sure that a thin turbulent boundary layer of up to 10mm across the root chord reducing to about 7 at the tips would be of some considerable benefit at the Reynolds numbers we operate at considering that a Honker extrapolated (as opposed to interpolating via the Bjerksan method which, as you can probably guess, gives too narrow a ‘tombola effect’ reference baseline – a common mistake made amongst my peers) lift/drag field profile on a typical flex wing shows that we are operating right on the edge of the drag bucket and that this has a tendency to restrict the expediency at both extremes of the polar curve apart from when the wing is operating in a much higher density fluid such as CO2 and that in order to overcome the shortfall in theoretical performance gain we would really need to have an infinite aspect ratio and a gravitational constant of  6.67800 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2  Rather than the 6.67300 we have in this universal neck of the woods. But we can’t and we don’t. So let’s hear it for the turbulent boundary layer! Don’t you agree Doreen?

Yours Dr Leon See

 

 

Dear Doc

For once I agree with you! We used to have a bucket and it certainly held a lot of dense fluid and had a lovely aspect when placed upon our rather uneven boundary wall where we used to store it – so yes, lets hear it for the good old TBL (as I like to call it – bad habit I know).

I hope this helps, Doreen.

 

 

Dear Doreen,

Why oh why oh why is Skywings full of writing? I mean, there are only 26 (okay 52 if you count the big ones) letters in the alphabet (and okay 10 number digits making a grand total of 62) and I’m fed up with seeing the same old ones over and over and over again. Can’t they put in some hieroglyphs or just a few normal coloured patterns instead? 

HHM! Dirk Spindle

 

Dear Dirk

This is another one of life’s great questions and I can only point you towards the words of that great scholar, Lulu (no, not that one, the other one) who said, “The reason people think I look good now is because I was never a beauty as a wee girl. And thank heavens. It's frightening to get old anyway, but if your looks were the cornerstone of your life, well, it would be very difficult.”

I hope this helps, Doreen.

 

 
Dear Doreen,
I’m a hang glider pilot. I met this girl. What should I do?
Fond regards, Aaron Aaronsonson.
 
Dear Aaron
I’ve put a well- illustrated and very comprehensive book in the post.
I hope this helps, Doreen.

Dear Doreen,

Could you help settle a legal argument I’m having with a small child? If I’m out flying and I catch a toy balloon can I claim salvage rights?

Yours truly, Sue Tendency

Dear Sue

Oh dear, you’ve entered a bit of a minefield here Sue. I have had a quick look on the www and it all hinges around the outcome of the Hodge/Brindley case of 1979. In that case the Plaintiff (Brindley) won but only because the balloon had what was technically ‘a restraining cord’ rather than ‘a length of string’ tied to it. And Hodge was actually on a chair lift…in Belgium. Hmmm, tricky one! I can see the European courts elbowing in on this. Good luck!

I hope this helps, Doreen.

 
News

A hang glider pilot has been rescued by emergency workers seven hours after he crashed and became trapped in trees at Mount Cole National Park, in Victoria's south-west.

The 35-year-old man from South Melbourne, had taken off from Ben Nevis peak about 1.15pm (AEST) on Sunday when his hang glider was struck by down drafts, Victoria Police said.

The glider came down in trees on the slope of Ben Nevis leaving the man dangling 15 metres above the ground.

His friends called police and the State Emergency Service (SES).

"State Emergency Service personnel went to the scene and used ropes to secure the man, who was trapped in trees about 15 metres above the ground," Senior Constable Wayne Wilson said.

"Police Search and Rescue Squad members from Melbourne were called to the scene and with the SES placed more securing lines on the man."

He was finally freed at 8pm on Sunday. He suffered a cut lip and a strained arm, but did not need hospital treatment.

Canberra Calling

Hopefully I'm going to be a little less tetchy this month after getting last month's rant off my chest and at least managing to get an extremely chilly half hour in the air since my last report. I'm also happy to note that in spite of media enthusiasm, Lleyton got knocked out of Wimbledon, the soccer team failed to win the Asian cup, the Kiwis won the rugby test series and the only recent highlight for Aussie sport has been coming second in the Tour de Steroids.

The weather here hasn't improved much. In frustration at yet another blown out Saturday, I decided to head for the metropolis in Sydney to do tourist stuff for the weekend. Inevitably I returned home to Monday morning tales of “where were you yesterday, we flew for hours”. I'll perhaps save my rant about Sydney for another month lest you all think I'm not having a good time here.

And so on to my thought for the month, I'll claim this one is vaguely flying related...

One thing I found quite surprising when I got to know a few of the Canberra locals in the office and on the hill was their attitude towards some of the classically Australian wildlife, namely macropus giganteus, the eastern grey kangaroo. (With a latin name like that, I was half expecting to meet an oversize cat as seen in The Goodies circa 1975)

I suppose that my initial view of the beasties was like that of most Europeans, they're so different to anything that we are used to seeing that it is pretty cool to come across them, especially when they are running around in the wild. The amount of film I have used chasing ever better photographs of them is a testament to this opinion. (I'm still a 35mm dinosaur when it comes to 'proper' photography)

Those locals who have expressed an opinion within my earshot however tend to regard them at best as a pain in the backside, or at worst, vermin that need to be controlled. The problem seems to be two pronged. To the agriculturally inclined, the roos will eat the grass that you have been trying to grow to feed your sheep or cows, you can imagine that after ten years of drought, green grass is a somewhat precious commodity around here. To the motorist around Canberra, ie most of the population, they pose a threat similar to that of deer in the UK, only collisions occur rather more frequently. Usually the result of a collision is expensive, a roo has most of its weight at bumper height, so tends to do a lot of damage to the front end of a car, I suppose this could be considered a slight improvement on the option of having a deer sliding over your bonnet and through the windscreen. Like deer, roos seem to have been rather short changed in the brain cell department. When faced with an approaching threat, they will sit tight for a while, until the threat gets really close, then they will decide it's time to run off and explode from their cover in a random direction which might well be into the path of the approaching vehicle, or right past the innocent paraglider pilot walking out of the local landing field, a cause for a serious brown trouser moment. (There the article is now demonstrably flying related)

In the interest of balance I should probably explain that not all of the locals want to see kangaroo stew becoming a staple of the Canberra diet. There was a large fuss recently when the department of Defence announced that it planned to cull the unsustainable population of roos that were occupying a couple of military training areas. The local tree huggers were out lobbying the local politicians and eventually the plan had to be dropped. It remains to be seen what happens when the grass stops growing in the summer and hundreds of roos are starving to death on the outskirts of the city.

So where do I stand on this? I think I swing both ways, depending on my mood. (I can hear Doreen getting excited already) In the two years that I have lived in Canberra I know 2 people who spent time in hospital when their motorbikes had an argument with a roo; one fellow pilot wrote off his four wheel drive in another incident (he now drives an even bigger one fitted with kick ass bull bars!) I have had a couple of close shaves in the car myself in addition to the above-mentioned brown trouser moment. However it is rather amazing to see a dozen large animals bouncing across a hillside at high speed. If nothing else, roo herding from the air adds another layer of entertainment to the ridge soaring experience on those days when you can't get very high above the hill. I still can't help feeling that the Department of Defence missed a golden opportunity to give its trainee snipers a go with moving targets. They could have quietly dealt with the problem then got the engineers in to dig a large hole to dispose of the evidence before it got too smelly. I also think that you can't beat a roo steak cooked medium-rare, served with a red berry sauce and roasted vegetables. Drool.

Simon Dillworth

 

I put this in again to fill in space… sorry, in case people missed it.

Low Air Time Malvern Members At Kettle Sings

 

At the committee it was raised how we often do not get to see new low airtime members. And consequently they do not get involved with the Club. A problem that arises because of the 15 hr minimum limit that applies to Kettle Sings. So just when they could do with some help, we leave them to their own devices at not a particularly easy site, Castle Morton.

 

So we have decided that on selected days, under certain conditions, they can fly from KS. Apart from a couple of reasons; spine back and houses underneath, a much better site. It has a much better take off, a reasonable top to bottom, and huge bottom landing.

 

How will the days be selected? Well this will pretty much be up to you. If you want to fly, even mid week, give me a call.

 

01684 572723

 

But I will also flag up days that I think will be good on the mail list.

 

If you need any more information, or are not sure about something, give me a call.

 

Conditions:

 

1    A Malvern club coach must be on site.

2   You must be a full member.

3   You should have some airtime achieved recently, say 5 or 6 hrs

4   You should have a working 2 meter radio.

5    A reasonably modern glider, good glide angle, with speed system.

6    And on the day you must report to the coach before flying.

 

See you there, Bryan.

Oiyitsmytubesobuggeroff

 (Editor’s selections from Youtube – Send in your own favourites)

This is what happens to men who don’t have a hobby (and live in Kidderminster). Thanks Jim.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IaGhZRHljd8

Some good in-flight Hg footage here with a relentless driving sorta soundtrack. 

But why is he sticking his tongue out?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=22FCWUjUWBw

There’s a hint about halfway through this Dune de Pyla Video that these brothers may hail from Kidderminster. 

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=K_snguy_cu4
 






Finding free flying just too dull? Try this…
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s7GadUhRFyk
 






Name the glider (geeks only) (and old ones at that)
Looks similar to another of the same period but there is one vital clue to distinguish them.






 
 
 
Go4IT

WIN WIN WIN!
 


READ THIS AND DON’T                                                                  anything of monetary value

Entries to Tim Crow to be in within one month of the flight.

GO4IT Rules

 

1.    UK flights only.
2.    No infringement of airspace, club or local site rules.
3.    Must have Pilot rating or be under instruction from one on the day.

4.    Flights between 01Dec to 30Nov.
5.    Co-ordinates for T/O and landing required plus distance from point to point in Km as a

       check. Flights will be scored to nearest 100m.
6.    Defined flights score extra, see BHPA rules below.
7.    Stone's throw award for smallest flight submitted (or known about) provided
       distance 5km or greater.

 

Flight Types and Scoring (see http://www.pgcomps.org.uk/ for complete rules)

 

Standard Flights:

 

Loop Flights:

 

Declared Flights:

 

Rules at http://www.pgcomps.org.uk/