You Just Never Know….

(Mansfield Encampment 2015, July 28th)

Even as “long time” (expert?) pilots in Mansfield area, today we got “schooled”.

Mia was up for some flying and I was more then happy to oblige by running the rig. To be honest the last few weeks around here have been far from classic conditions so it was nice to see a day where the soaring numbers looked promising enough that Mia wanted to check it out. We headed out to the tow site with Jeff K,  an old friend tagging along for support. Nice having just one glider for the rig so it was a “Busch Lite” day for the “tow-meister”. 

By 12:45, under mainly blues sky with the occasional Q popping here and there,  I was pouring gas over the cylinders of our Ford tow rigs gutless 302 and Mia was quickly up and out of the cradles. The start of the tow was soft with a slow climb. After the first mile things suddenly picked up and she was quickly up to 2000ft agl, pinning off in 500fpm up. Perfect release with a perfect chute opening, two minutes later all the line was back at the rig, outriggers stowed and we were on our way back to the set-up area. By the time we got back and our gear picked up, Mia indicated she was over 8000ft asl and was heading west.

Mia, not on any sort of a mission was going head….. well sort of…. over there …or here… maybe…. Eventually she did get lined up west with a 25km run West to Withrow. After seeing nothing but blue sky to the west (in the direction of Waterville) she decided to head back to the tow site.  From there a quick 8km jaunt up Leahy Cut-off…. and back to the tow site. Last, a quick 14km drive down to Saint Andrews road (6th and L-road) and again… back to the tow site. After nearly 4 hours she had managed the most complex 70km FAI triangle you could imagine and seemed satisfied to call it a day.

Mia also mentioned that she had been totally under dressed for the flight and was freezing cold with several gains taking her up over 10,000. (always a challenge to get the right layer of clothing when flying our desert conditions !).

Landing was interesting as it was pretty early to be setting down (before 5pm). During her setup I could only give general surface conditions (everything from north through south, 0 to 10mph)…. as we say, things had definitely gone “light and vacuum” when she turned to final.  It was pretty evident that things were still cooking as she got a big pop of lift at a 100ft that caused her to go long and land in the cut crop on the west side of the tow road. When she got the glider into ground effect it was suddenly a quartering tail but with a very good hard run she pulled off a great nose up landing….climbing out of her harness she admitted that she was “done”, the flight had been allot of work had she was glad to be down. (Mia’s Flight)

 

Now, this is about when we got some higher education about flying this area….. It had been light and variable for nearly an hour in the goal field. There was the occasional dust devil that wandered by but nothing of the intensity we were about to experience. At almost the worst time possible, (sail released and not ready to be folded on her VQ) we got hit by a medium size dust devil from an entirely new direction (east). Not a huge problem at the moment but things were rapidly going to get worse.

Within a minute the dust devil had passed and we had a moment where we figured everything was going to settle down and be good for the rest of the take-down.  Nope…. just as suddenly, only a minute or two later,  we got hit by what could only be described as a clear air gust front. Normally a gust front out here is marked with plainly visible dust as it approaches, this sprang up without any notice, as if the area had suddenly lifted off.  Without warning we now had 20mph south winds with our biggest problem being the glider was not oriented properly for the unexpected south wind. Getting caught like this (glider partially broken down) is a little like getting caught with your pants down…. sail released and everything exposed at the worse time.  Thankfully with two sets of hands to haul things in we managed to get the beast into the bag….. Yikes… never saw that coming!

The wind continued to blow 15 to 20mph while we loaded the glider and headed off to Park Lake for a swim.

The Moral of this story… never drop your guard when dealing with “mother nature”