Sunday, April 19, 2009

I stayed up in Whitewater on Friday and Saturday. We had around 12 pilots on Friday. I got a one hour flight in and then a 2.5 hour flight. There were a lot of thermals around and plenty of other pilots to help you find them. You can see a 40x speed animation of my GPS track below. Notice my altitude and climb rates at the bottom. Saturday was a bit more difficult. There was high cirrus and lower clouds starting to fill in. I made it up to cloudbase ~ 4k twice. I experienced some cloudsuck when I got there and pulled in for full speed and the vario was still beeping. I had an upwind glide that must have been right along a lift line because ~3 miles later I was still right at cloudbase. It was really cool to zip along the underside of the clouds at 40 mph. I eventually started to get rained on and raced back to the airport after the 1-1.5 hourflight. I got to kill altitude from 3k which was a blast (i'm usually struggling to stay up). I got packed up before the sprinkle turned into rain at the airport. A great weekend for sure!

No comments: