Dave's Day 3

Today, I was beaten by the weather man.  Now, let me explain that statement.  At the morning briefing and on the weather briefing sheets that were handed out, the weather man said there would be 100% cirrus cloud cover over Leszno by 4 pm.  A short 2:15 task was set for our class to get us home before the day shut down.

Unfortunately, the weather man was wrong and as of 8 pm, there are still no cirrus clouds over Leszno.  Because of the expected short day, I started with another group at 1345, and we had a slow run in weak thermals and low cloud base (about 3000 AGL) for the first and second legs.  Most other pilots must have had better weather information as the majority of the class started an hour after our group in significantly better weather.

The problem with setting short tasks like 2 hrs is that it lets people wait that extra hour or more and fly in better conditions and really is no test of pilot skill, but of team composition and which team has the best weather man.  This is really frustrating for us who don't live on this continent and don't have access to good weather sites, or can't read the language on the local sites.  Well, that's enough complaining!  Hopefully, the weather man will improve his forecasting.

As you can see by the barograph trace, things improved significantly after 3 pm, in part due to being later in the day, but also because the first and second legs ran through the area where a lot of rain fell during yesterdays thunderstorms.

 On the route map below, you can see the large deviation that I made on the third leg.  This was again because of the large blue hole from the yesterday's rain.  The path that I followed was quite good with a really nice cloud street that ran about 1/3 of the leg north.  I was then able to connect to another shorter street and then some isolated clouds before turning almost 90 degrees across the blue to enter the third area.  From there, it was a turn back towards the clouds in the east  for the fourth area where I was able to connect with a good climb that put me on final glide back across about a 30 km hole.