Flying X-C in January

For me this story starts with the following email from Tony Condon on a Thursday afternoon: “any chance you’ll be ready to fly the libelle sunday? I think it will be a downwind dash-able day.” At the time I read that it was freezing cold outside and soaring cross-country was about the last thing on my mind. Huddling up by my fireplace with a hot cup of coffee was more in line with my weekend plans. But I did recall when Tony made his flight to Arkansas the previous year I said something like “wow, that sounds like fun.” And, I have often talked about flying group cross-countries together. I just hadn’t really thought much about doing it in the middle of the winter. I’ve been flying sailplanes for 45 years now, and I know (as does everyone else except Tony apparently) that one simply does not fly gliders cross-country in the winter. I guess Tony must have missed that lesson. In a subsequent email, he even said it was looking like it might be a 200 mile day. If anyone else had said that, I’d probably ask them what they’d been smoking, but I’m beginning to think that he might be on to something with these wintertime downwind dashes.

It took some careful diplomacy and a lot of sweet-talking, but I managed to convince my wife to crew for me. I’m still not sure what this is going to cost me. We arrived at the gliderport around 10:30 on Sunday morning to start assembling the ships. I’m not sure we had any plan other than to just head downwind as far as we could go. By this time the weather forecast was not looking as rosy as it did a day or two earlier. There were still indications of lift — some cu’s if I recall correctly — but they were scrappy and I don’t recall any streeting. Jerry Boone was kind enough to come out and give us a tow. He had some car trouble on the way to the airport so we were a little later getting off than we had planned.

I was the first to launch. We hit some good lift on tow, but of course by the time I got off tow the lift was weak and very scrappy. Occasionally the vario would pop up to 5 kts, but only for a second. On one side of the thermal the vario showed lift while on the other side it showed down. This started out to be one of those flights where if you work the lift real carefully it might just slow your sink rate. After working the thermal for 5 or 10 minutes, I had managed to only lose about 5 or 6 hundred feet. By now Tony was in the air and he soon released several hundred feet above me. But now we had two of us in the air and it is always easier to find and center a thermal when someone else is circling with you, especially if that someone is Tony. It wasn’t too long before we were close to each other’s altitude, working the same thermal, but by then we were also less than 1500’ AGL and downwind of the airport.

There is a point in every X-C where one has to decide to commit and just go for it. I’ve heard it alluded to as “breaking the apron strings” when you first get outside of gliding distance to the airport. For those who have never soared X-C, I think there is something of a psychological barrier. But once you get out of gliding distance of the airport, your decision making and thought processes are totally different, and I think your flying improves as well. For us, we were at that point about a mile or two south of the airport as we slowly drifted out of gliding distance, still well below our release altitude. A rather inglorious start to a cross-country flight for sure.

Eventually, the lift did get better (did I mention that one flies better when they are out of gliding distance from the airport?) and I was starting to gain more than I was losing most of the time. I’m guessing my average climb rate might have been about 10 fpm, but we were drifting south at probably 30 or 40 fpm, so things were really looking up! Finally, the thermals broke loose and we were actually climbing at a respectable rate all the way around the thermal for several turns. It was 35 minutes after I released before I finally climbed back up through my release altitude of 2000’. By then, I was well south of the airport. I worked that thermal to about 4500 feet and then we headed south.

Years of flying a 1-26 has taught me the bad habit of circling in every hint of lift and staying as long as I possibly can. I am trying hard to break this habit, but when Tony headed south, I just couldn’t resist one or two more turns and then I quickly followed lest I lose sight of him. We glided several miles to a point just east of Cheney dam where we once again found a decent thermal worth working. Highway 54 soon slipped by as we drifted downwind in the thermal. This thermal topped out at about 4000 msl and we soon headed south again feeling almost comfortable with all that extra altitude.

Up to this point, Tony and I had been flying fairly close together since we first joined up just south of Sunflower. It was somewhere along this glide that our flights began to depart. I’m still not sure how it happened. I was following about a half mile behind Tony and a little below him. But as we glided south Tony seemed to just get higher and higher than me. The L/D of the Cirrus and Libelle are not much different, so I think either he was in better air or I had my spoilers open and didn’t notice. Whatever caused it, we got to the next thermal with Tony still up around 4000’ msl and I was closer to 3000’. Tony apparently got into some decent lift at that point, because I never saw him again after that. I was back down to scrappy 200 fpm up on one side to 200 fpm down on the other side, averaging something less than zero sink. I bumped along from one unworkable thermal to the next continuing south hoping I’d find something to get me back up. Eventually, I found myself at about 1000 agl a couple of miles NE of Viola at the point where K-42 crosses the Ninnescah River. The lift never materialized and it looked like an outlanding was inevitable. As I was turning downwind and reaching for the landing gear handle, the vario jumped solidly up to 5 kts. I decided it was worth trying just one turn to see if it was anything. To my surprise the vario stayed positive all the way around. After a few more turns I decided that I wasn’t going to land out after all. That thermal took me to about 4000’ msl and once again, I was feeling pretty fat with all that altitude. I headed south again, and my course would take me just west of Wellington.

As a physics teacher I teach about the fundamental forces of nature. But I think I have discovered a sixth force. There seems to be some mysterious attraction between a sailplane and an airport. The force is directly proportional to the size of the airport and inversely proportional to the altitude of the sailplane. Although my initial intention was to continue on course and pass west of Wellington, one can clearly see on my ground track how the sailplane was pulled eastward by this weird force towards the airport north of Wellington. I soon found myself about 5 miles northwest of the airport at about 1000 feet agl. Once again, I had an off-field landing spot picked out as I circled in zero sink while continuing to drift to the southeast. I realized that if I could just hang on to this zero sink for another 10 minutes, I’d be over the airport at Wellington. The last 5 miles of my flight consisted of me circling in zero sink while drifting from one potential off-field landing site to the next. Once I got to what looked like a good place to enter downwind I put the gear down and landed at Wellington. When I called my wife, she was close by in Conway Springs so it was a quick and easy retrieve from there.

When I asked my wife if she had heard anything from Tony, she said it looked like he was headed well south of Wellington. As it turned out, Tony managed to avoid the airport “tractor beam” that I got caught in and continued south. His best and highest climb was just south of Wellington and occurred about the time I was digging myself out of that hole near Viola. Tony continued on south and landed in a small grass airstrip near Newkirk, Oklahoma. Not a bad day for January soaring.