WHGPC January 2006 newsletter

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Thoughts for pilots who want to improve (part I)

Guy Harding

These ideas are my perspective on some of the issues that need addressing in becoming a better pilot. They are just my ideas generated from my experiences (good and bad) flying. As such it is quite probable, that other pilots will see things differently; especially when it comes to the more esoteric subjects such as attitude, fear etc. But hopefully you will get something out of these articles, even if it’s only that people approach flying in different ways and that different experiences change the way we approach flying.

Looking back now on the early years of my flying, I wish I had a bit of this kind of information to get me going in the right direction. But it certainly felt like I spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Hopefully you won’t have to.

Attitude

What kind of pilot do you want to be?

Let’s face it; learning to fly like the top international pilots is no easy feat. They have got there by beating most of the other competitors in their respective countries. And to do that in some countries you’ve pretty much got to dedicate your life to the sport. I’m sure we would all like to fly at the levels these pilots fly at, but the reality is that most of us can’t or won’t commit the time and money necessary to achieve that goal. Most people, even with the time and money, would not see that particular goal as important enough to warrant that level of commitment. And why should they? For every person HG represents something slightly different. Some are content to while away the days on their local ridge enjoying the simplicity and wonder of free flight. Some like to develop their skills and slowly stretch their boundaries, learning the innumerable skills that come with inland and XC flying. And for others, being able to compete and compare their skills against others, within a 3 dimensional playing field is the greatest satisfaction.

None of these views are better or worse than the next. It just comes down to the individual and how they enjoy the sport. What you do have to decide is what kind of pilot you want to be? And then more importantly, to understand realistically what kind of commitment and time it will take to get there. For example, developing the skills to soar your local ridge to enjoy the pleasures of free flight is a relatively simple task, requiring no great time investment; where as learning to be a competent xc or competition pilot requires far more time and energy. If you can match your goals in HG to the amount of time and energy you’re prepared to put in there’s not normally a problem. But when we can’t put in that time and energy to reach the goals we’d like to achieve, one can get frustrated with the sport. Even more importantly, getting frustrated we are not achieving the level of flying we would like, because we haven’t really thought about and understood what it will take to reach them.

If your one of those who are happy ridge soaring then you probably don’t need to read any further.

However, a lot of people who enter the sport seem to be those who want to stretch their boundaries, and explore the inner mental challenges that flying provides, to be what drives them.

If you’re one of these people there are a few things you need to think about to avoid the frustration I’ve talked about and felt.

Understand what it is REALLY going to take to reach those goals. It’s no good wanting to be a competent xc pilot, for example, if you’re only going to fly 10 times a year. Having a false sense of the time and energy required to reach our goals is one of the main reasons for frustration with the speed of our progress. It’s only after a few years in the sport that you come to realise just what it takes, and it’s generally a lot more than what a novice pilot thinks. If you’re only prepared to put in 10-20 hours of flying a year, expect your progress to be slow. Like wise if you’re not prepared to read up on meteorology, flight techniques and pester the senior pilots to tell you all the knowledge they have.

Decide how much time you are prepared to put into the sport. All people have other things in their life taking up their time. What you have to decide is what priority HG takes compared to all those other things. How important really is HG to you. Will you cut your night at the pub short to have a clear head for tomorrow’s flight? Are you prepared to give up other sports or leisure activities or to clear your weekend calendar just in case it’s flyable? Only you can decide the priority, but be realistic with the progress you can make in the time you’re allocating.

Come to grips with your physical location and the weather in your region. Are you in actual fact wanting to be world champion but living in Wellington? As a novice pilot you probably don’t know just how good or bad your location is compared to the best places to fly on the planet.

Living in Wellington for example requires a good deal of dedication to the sport if you really wish to improve at a reasonable rate. If you can only fly the weekends, lets face it; your flyable days are going to be pretty low, especially compared to Oz, Europe and the States. Which brings us to…?

Are you prepared to travel both locally and internationally to get to good flying conditions? Due to the influence of the Cook Strait, Wellington is more often than not unflyable. But that effect is localised, and it’s quite often a very different story 1 hour north. The Hawkes Bay is 3 ½ hours away, but its also one of the most regularly flyable places in the country with some of the most friendly xc terrain.

If you ever want to discover just how good flying can be, you’ll really have to head over the ditch to the world class flying parts of Australia have to offer. You’ll fly and learn as much in 2 weeks over there as you do in a whole season here. It just comes down to your level of commitment and the time and money you’re prepared to allocate.

What’s a crash worth

When you first start hang gliding you’ll be keen to progress as fast as you can. You want to learn everything at once. The fear of a crash is not as real as it should be, because, well, you haven’t had one yet. So your caution meter is probably not what it should be. Combine this with the fact that you don’t really know what you can and can’t get away with yet (the definition of being a novice), and you begin to realise that you should be learning the skills in baby steps rather than giant strides. This can be a hard thing to do because the very nature that makes people want to hang glide often makes them want to learn it fast. I can guarantee you one thing: If you step too far beyond your existing skills on a regular basis the law of averages will catch up with you and you will at some point crash. That crash may be a big or small one (let’s hope it’s a small one). But even if it is a small one, it will slow your learning progress down by a far larger degree than you would think possible. Take it from someone who has learnt the hard way, and can look back and now realise just how much it affected my progress.

You will know inside, generally before you take off, if you are pushing your boundaries too far. It’s just up to you whether you listen or ignore those feelings.

The corer ally to this is that you will be flying in conditions which you haven’t before, and it’s only natural to feel a little nervous before you take to the air. What you now have to do is assess the conditions and your skills logically to determine if it is safe for you to fly. And in doing so reduce the nervousness by logically working through the conditions to come up with that answer. If you decide you’re pushing it (you are introducing too many new factors into a flight), and you don’t fly, then in the long run you will be a much less nervous pilot.

Here’s my definition of what makes a generally nervous pilot: If someone pushes their limits on a regular basis, they will regularly have close scrapes, if not crashes. These close calls will create a bit of fear and adrenaline at the time. If this occurs even semi regularly then your mind will associate hang gliding with those feelings. And before you know it you will be standing on top of a hill rigging your glider, feeling nervous, wondering why the hell you feel this way on such a good flying day. The answer is because you’re about to do something that your brain has come to associate with fear.

The simple answer is don’t get to this stage. Sooner or later you’ll give up if you keep feeling this way. You should be looking forward to the flight not nervous of it.

Here are some things to consider when assessing weather to fly or not:

The wind is stronger/ gustier than you’ve experienced.

It’s a new site.

The wind is crossed on launch.

You’ve got new gear.

The landing is only just within reach for your experience/glider.

The landing is tighter than you’ve experienced.

The weather is changing.

Just remember: It’s ok not to fly. If you make a logical decision not to fly, you just loose one flight; if you were to fly you might loose a lot more. As the saying goes: ‘It’s better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here’.

The intermediate syndrome and whether to fly

The intermediate syndrome has been well documented. But here it is again: You’ve now got 20 or so hours under your belt, you haven’t had a crash yet and your starting to feel like your really getting on top of this hang gliding thing. Your confidence is high because everything has been going well and you’re looking to expand your skills at a more rapid pace and fly in some more diverse conditions. Ie: confidence has overtaken ability.

Unless a couple of early crashes dent you’re confidence, I think most people in their flying career go through this stage to some degree. The important thing is how you manage that confidence.

Know your abilities; recognise when you’re on the edge of them. Your inner voice and that feeling in your stomach will let you know when you’re there. By assessing the conditions logically you can figure out what new elements you are being presented with. Take into account how many new factors you’re introducing to the flight (it might be gear or site not just the conditions) and how much each one oversteps your existing experience. With these known you can make the final judgement on whether there are too many or if it oversteps you’re experience envelope by too large a degree.

By doing this assessment, if you’ve decided to fly, you should be less worried about the new factors when you step up to launch because it’s a known factor. Taking the unknown out of the equation generally reduces a lot of the nervousness.

The above obviously goes for the decisions you make while you’re in the air as well, assess your decisions logically and be conservative with those potentially risky moves.

Remember, smaller steps will reward you in the long run.

Being Current

As I’ve mentioned above, we all have different priorities and expectations on how often we can get out flying. When it comes to the risk level of the sport, the more often you do it the better your skills become and the less risk you pose to yourself, provided you stay within the safety limitations you’ve set for yourself as you progress. The intermediate syndrome is the most common time to step beyond your boundaries.

In my opinion the risk increases when you only get out for that occasional fly. To me that’s around 10 flying hours a year or maybe 10-15 flights a year or less. Around this level you’re not really getting enough time to remain current with your glider and your skills. This is especially true if you’re a novice or early intermediate pilot. By definition you only have a small amount of experience to call on and if you add to that, you haven’t flown for a while, flying conservatively is a must. That includes the conditions and locations you fly, not just what you try to achieve on a flight.

From my point of view a novice pilot cannot afford to take a casual approach to the first 20-40 hours of flying. It is the time when a pilot is most vulnerable to injury because of a lack of experience and flying on an irregular basis only increases the likelihood of a crash. I don’t want to scare any novice pilots off, but we are participating in an airborne sport for which we cannot afford to learn from major errors in judgement. The simple answer is to commit to flying as regularly as you can (conditions allowing), especially for those first 20-40 hours.

There is a catch 22 here which was painfully obvious to me, particularly in the early years of my flying. And that is as a novice you are more limited in the conditions in which to fly and when you do fly your skills generally don’t allow you to stay up as long as the more experienced pilots (inland sites in particular). Which means it takes even longer to build that experience. And this is particularly true in Wellington where the wind is a major factor. The only answer I have for this is to commit yourself to fly more when it is on and be prepared to travel to the likes of Hawkes Bay, where as I’ve said before is one of the more consistently flyable places in the country. When you do get to fly, particularly if its ridge soaring, practise things that develop your skills. Not just aimlessly boating up and down the ridge. Things such as:

Stalls

Steep turns

How slow can you 360 (thermalling practise) and what happens when you stall in a turn. How deeply does it stall and what’s the most efficient way to recover from it. You need to be comfortable with you glider in odd positions because it happens sometimes when inland flying. So practise it when the conditions are smooth. Again, it will eliminate the nervousness when it happens unexpectedly.

Take note of if you need to high side your glider or push out to slow down enough or do you have to pull in because your glider stalls in a turn. Does it fly perfectly straight hands off? You can tune your glider to make it behave in a more user friendly manner.

Flying fast putting in turns (aero tow practise, escaping clouds)

How low can you get on the ridge and get back up again (best later in the flight)

Fly to clouds to see if their working. Learn what a good cloud looks like.

When flying to clouds, note the distance when you start and begin to get a feel for how much height you’ll loose getting to them. Clouds are generally further away than they look.

Become aware of the G’s as you fly through lift and sink and compare the lag of your vario. This combined with role lag quite often means pilots aren’t initiating a turn in a thermal when they should.

Explore possible thermal triggers. Return to them regularly.

How much VG can you use and still control your glider while circling (thermalling)? Do you get a better sink rate with that VG? Is the lack of control worth the gain?

Can you spin your glider ¼ turn (to take advantage of variations in a thermal)? Some gliders do this better than others.

Reading the day

There are some points to make about figuring out what sort of day its going to be and when you should be taking off. This section could be a book in its own right (meteorology), but I’ll just cover what I think are some of the main points.

First up, learn how to read weather maps and particularly how they pertain to your area. 15 knots in Wellington may mean 5 knots in the Wairarapa. (A good map(s) is: http://www.metvuw.com/forecast/forecast.php?type=rain&region=nz&tim=K )

There are also internet weather stations doted around this area (check out: http://www.wind.co.nz/ and http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/tmcgavin/current_nzweather.html ) that are worth looking at. I look at them after I fly as well so I get to see what a good/bad/ average day looked like according to the stations and maps. Particularly wind speed and direction.

It also pays to learn what weather conditions are generally good in your region for flying. Eg: post frontal conditions and a dieing southerly in Wellington.

On the day itself, start reading the day and making mental notes as soon as you get up, if you’re going to be flying that day. At some stage you will transition from a novice or intermediate pilot into one of the senior pilots in the club. And then it will be other pilots ringing you to find out what you think of the day and if it’s worth heading out. It’s also worth figuring it out for yourself. If you rely on others you might be relying on the information of someone who is desperate to fly no matter what. But they won’t tell you that! So you may end up spending a day for a very low probability. Some days it may not really matter, other days you may want to be more circumspect. One thing for sure you will get sick of this sport real quick if you spend day after day hang driving.

One of the things I look at is the speed of the development of the day. To do this you need to check on the sky say every half hour to hour and note the change in the day. Paying particular attention to cloud and wind development. The wind can be very light in the morning and can fool you into thinking it will stay that way. Cloud speed is a good indication of what you will get later in the day. Bear in mind though that the speed of clouds over Wellington can have little in common with those in the Wairarapa or even Mt Climie for that matter.

The rate of cloud development as the morning goes on can indicate if you are looking at an early T.O or if you’ve got more time. If clouds start building rapidly early on, the day will quite likely OD. You may question whether it’s worth going at all. A situation like this may mean you should have an alternative like heading to the coast, as a really unstable day will pull in a good sea breeze.

As the morning goes on and you drive to your site of choice, keep checking the rate of cloud development to get a feel for the ‘speed’ of the day.

Be aware of the temperature at ground level and at TO. If its still warm at the top of Mt Climie for example, it is more likely the day will be stable. On a ‘standard’ day there is roughly a 3 degree drop in temperature for every 1000ft of altitude gain.

Sometimes there is an initial thermal release after the ground first warms up. Then things go blue again as the sky waits for a second, and then more regular, cycling of warm air. Launching in this blue phase, or more likely the first thermal release of the day can have you on the deck after a very short flight.

When to take off

Once you’re on the hill, your glider is rigged and if you’ve made the decision to fly; the question is when. This decision is more often than not the most important you will make on the day! So you need to learn to know what to look for to give yourself the best chance to get up. If you just blindly wait until others start to launch and slot yourself into the queue, your success rate won’t be what it could. You might for example launch into the tail end of a cycle, and wonder why the guy who launched just before you, got up and you didn’t (been there!).

My personal experience with this decision was (and still is to a degree) to take off when the day is well and truly working. Although in the Wellington region, it would be rare for me to describe a day that way! The danger with this is that we actually wait too long. (done that too!). It’s often through nervousness, a lake of understanding and (my favourite) waiting for a guaranteed ticket to base. We often wait until the tail end of the day and don’t get much air time, or more frequently get caught by the sea breeze. (As most good days in the Wellington region and in most of NZ for that matter, produce a sea breeze, it pays to know roughly when to expect it and what to look for. Which is; a blue hole on the seaward side of a sky with cus. The actual line is often delimited with straggly cloud hanging down from the normal base.) Being caught with a sea breeze up your keel and looking at a great sky out front, for me, is one of the most frustrating experiences in flying. Try not to experience it for yourself!

One of the things you should be watching for from the time you get to the top of the hill, is to become aware of the spacing between cycles, their length and their strength. To do this you need to set up in a place where you can feel the cycles over time, not over the back of the hill and completely out of the breeze. (I’m talking about light to moderate days where your glider is not going to get a pounding). If you know for example that a good thermal is coming through about every 10 minutes at about 10 knots (lucky) and lasts for 2-3 minutes, then you will:

know that it will be risky to launch if its already been cycling for 2-3 minutes

that a 5 knot cycle is not a good one this day

and that you will probably be waiting for 10 minutes before the next good cycle comes through.

I realise that in the real world things aren’t so exact, but flying is all about increasing your odds and having the above information can increase yours.

Some days however are nothing like the above. You may only get one (or a few) good cycle come through all day (hence the ‘one o’clock train from Zolas’ that some pilots refer to). On days like this the only option is to be in your harness and ready to go. You will find the older pilots more willing to do this (the novice pilots just wonder why we would want to sit under their gliders cooking), because of the years of missed thermals and the following sled ride when we’ve launched in desperation.

By the way, your sink rate of approximately 200 fpm equates to about to 2 knots (3.6kph). If the air is flowing vertically this should theoretically keep you up if you’re flying straight. Of course below ridge height the thermal will probably be profiling the hill, so not travelling vertically and you’re not going to able to fly at min sink so close to the hill. You are also going to have to circle so you’re going to need a lot more than 2 knots. How much more depends on the slope of the hill, how efficiently you can thermal and that you actually want to climb. If I launched into 6-7 knots or less I would certainly have a back up plan as to where to go if an initial pass didn’t look promising. Actually it’s always a good idea to have several backups in mind before you launch, just in case that initial cycle doesn’t pay off. You don’t normally have time to fly round aimlessly thinking about where to go next.

When launching into a cycle the first minute of your flight can be incredibly important. If you can fly efficiently for that first minute and get above the hill, you will be in a part of the thermal that is now travelling more vertically (there is no more hill to profile), giving you more lift and making your job much easier. Its quite often the case that multiple cores from different sources can coalesce above the top of the hill, adding to the strength of your thermal. So you need to tune your mind into flying efficiently and prepare yourself for what will be required, BEFORE YOU LAUNCH. Getting into the groove as you go can mean being on the deck shortly after! Zolas in the Hawkes Bay and Kourau are prime examples of sites that seem much easier to get up once your above the hill.

If what looks like a working cloud out front is coming your way, i.e. there’s some wind, look at the possibility of launching when the cloud passes over head. The wind can blow the base of the thermal along allowing it to keep sucking a fresh supply of warm air, giving it a better chance of it continuing to work as it passes overhead. So in wind be on the lookout for these signs of advanced warning.

If your flying in a competition, you should aim to be one of the first pilots to launch (assuming the day is working) not one of the last, as seems to so often happen. The newer pilots seemed to either get nervous about taking off early or want the more experienced pilots to show them the way. Well, if you want them to show you the way for more than just the first thermal, you’re going to need to be up and away before them. So when each pilot catches you, you can at least spend some time with them and learn from them in the process. If you launch latter you will never see them. One of the best aspects to competition is the ability to fly with and learn from other pilots. Make sure you give yourself the opportunity.

In the next installment:

Going Cross Country

Pre flight planning

Building a picture of the day

When and how to leave the hill

Do you really want to stay up

What direction line and speed to take

To stop for lift or not / and searching

Gliding away from the road

Gliding techniques

Changing your mind / making decisions

Out landings

Judging wind when landing

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