The briefings are held at South-West Texas Junior College gym - located on the airfield perimeter; probably they have a home-field advantage, since without air conditioning their opponents might wilt!
Today, all three Canadian National Team pilots are flying - Assigned Area Tasks; A task is 3 hours 15, B task is 3 hours.
15m task: min 329 km, nominal 404.6, maximum 490.
18m task: min 355, nom 431, max 511.
Open: 381 min, 475.6, max 580.
Yesterday's winning speeds were in the high 140's. This, for here, is "good, but not great".
Today, grid is at 1245, no launch before 13:15. Tow heights are 2900 MSL, so a touch under 2,000'.
Each task is roughly clockwise, start with Uvalde at the top of the circle. Turn areas are 10 km to 25 km, depending usually on airspace constraints.
The Uvalde - Garner Field airport is busy; for the contest, they're closing it from 1130-1500 daily. Right now - 1154 - the gliders are "staged" along the sides of the runway, full of water (explanation tomorrow), with covers on against the sun - which affects the fibreglass construction and cooks instruments in the black panel (to avoid reflections in the canopy). Covers come off at grid time, when the gliders are pushed to their pre-ordained grid positions ("gridding"). They're then compressed, once pointing all the same way - 100 gliders take a lot of runway.
On return around 7 pm typically, the gliders are recovered from the runway by crew, de-bugged, cleaned, put into the tiedown, and covered. Log files are sent to the scorers within 30 mins of landing. About 8 pm, our day, which starts at 7:15 am, is done, and off for a shower, dinner, and any prep for the next day (little blogging). In 38-40C weather, it's tiring. And it's humid, so we can't even say "it's a dry heat"!
Today, Nick is 2nd off; Dave is 42nd; Jerzy is 52nd. The 15 and 18 m classes launch in turn (15 m first today). Open is off the parallel runway. An early departure gives you more time to assess the lift of the day, but you have to hang around for an hour or so before departing, which is tiring. If you launch last, the start gate opens about 15 minutes after you start rolling, giving less time, but you've flown an hour less (but sat on a 100F runway for an extra hour being sand-blasted). Six of one, half dozen of the other...
With the lapse rate, at 6,000' it's about 17C, which the crew envy the pilots getting to experience.
Weather - max lift expected to 8,500'. At 2 pm, it will be lower, and 3-4 kts, at 4 pm, 5-6 knots.
Trigger temperature - where the heated air has sufficient buoyancy to separate from the ground - occurs at 94F/34.5C, expected at 1345L CDT. Winds will be SE 8-13 - yesterday, they were a little lighter. Outlook for tomorrow - pretty well identical. The weather channel says by early next week we'll be in the high 90's instead of mid-100's. Yay.
We are testing our crew procedures on this launch, since all pilots are flying, and then we will be consistent for the contest, helping the pilots fly faster by vanishing into the background.
Two gliders from the same team (not ours) touched yesterday during thermal entry, left wing of one to underside of tailboom of the other. Happily, there was no damage, and both gliders recovered to Uvalde without further incident. This was the topic of the morning safety briefing.
Next update: start times and A or B task - inquiring minds will want to know!
Dan
01 August 2012
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On the mid-air "touch": The used to say, if you can read the other guy's instruments you are too close.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, thank god they didn't "touch" harder!