High Altitude Glider Flight

4 Sep 2010
Even as the sun rose that morning, it looked like an excellent soaring day. I was dressed for summer operations. I was wearing my VFF shoes (clearly designed for summer), shorts, and a tee-shirt. Several people quipped that there might be wave lift, due to the westerly winds. There was likely also ridge lift. There were incredibly strong thermals early in the day, and even if the wave or ridge lift were not working, it would still be a great day to be a glider pilot.

On a lark, I packed the "new" oxygen system in the glider, and hooked up the cannula. Three years ago, I bought this oxygen system shortly before I found that I was being relocated to Switzerland. Due to the timing of the equipment purchase and the relocation, I had never made use of the oxygen system. It was a shame to buy this brand new toy, and never be able to use it for over three years!

I hooked up the oxygen system to the Mountain High regulator, and hooked up the cannula to my face. Psst! Yep! It smelled like oxygen that has been in a bottle for over a year. After some tow-rope-break-induced delays, I launched later than I had originally anticipated, donning my summer-clothes and cannula.

I immediately connected with some intensely strong thermals. In only a few minutes, I was up to 500 feet below cloud base at around 7 or 8000 feet. I started nosing around for what had to be wave. I hung around on the upwind side of the clouds, and aggressively worked any gusts. In this situation, my standard procedure of waiting for the vario to drop off before starting to turn takes too long -- the lift is too spotty and broken and disjointed right under a rotor cloud to use regular thermalling techniques. So I just treat it like "really aggressive thermalling", and turn at the first indication of a gust of lift.

It didn't take long, and I connected with the wave, just over the eastern ridge of the Massanutten, east of Fort Valley. In short order, I climbed above cloud base at a steady 2 knots, still not expecting this to be a great wave day. (At least it's nice to get above the clouds!) The duty officer called Potomac Tracon, who had cleared the airspace of all jet liners, and said we were OK to climb to 18,000 feet without worrying about conflicts with the jet liners. By this time, I was climbing through 10,000 feet, and almost at the top of the clouds.



I continued to head south toward Luray, where Jim Kellett joined me in the wave (but not for long). As far as I could tell, we were the only two people within radio contact to get into the wave on that day. The key to working this day's wave was patience. Since I didn't have anywhere to go, I had all day. Eventually, I climbed above 14,000 feet -- higher than I had ever climbed before. The oxygen system was working perfectly, filling my nostrils with oxygen-bottle scented air. The Mountain High regulator has a pressure sensor, which determines how much "puff" of oxygen to deliver to the cannula. The quantity of puff is based on your altitude. On the ground, it is not much more than a 'token puff', as I continued to climb, the puffs became more substantial.



Several times, I had decided that "this has to be the top of the lift" and almost gave up. It was not terribly cold at 14,000 feet, and since I was above the clouds, the sunshine was keeping me quite warm. I headed a bit more upwind, to the southern corner of Fort Valley. There, I connected with a solid 4 knot lift that took me all the way to 17,600 feet. I had decided beforehand to cut-out at 17,500 feet of altitude -- just to have some margin of safety so I wouldn't break into Class A airspace inadvertently. I made a quick recording of this part of the flight with my Blackberry camera-phone, and headed south toward Harrisonburg. The flight computer showed the outside air temperature at 20 F.

The flight toward Harrisonburg was slightly upwind, and I wasn't overly concerned about finding lift along the way. By the time I got to just north of Harrisonburg, I was just over 10,000 feet, approximately as high as the clouds. Time was growing short -- a schedule of returning in time to disassemble and get to the Flight Instructors' caucus was drawing near. I headed directly back to Front Royal, aided by a tail-wind, with a ground-speed averaging 110 knots, even though I only had 80 knots indicated. My return flight to Front Royal cost me only about 1000 feet. Apparently, on the return trip, I must have been riding the wave, or at least minimizing the time-in-sink along the way.

Along the way back, I flew close enough to a cloud to see the effect called "Glory"



What a day! Unfortunately, we (the owners of the glider Juliet Sierra) are having a little problem with our Volkslogger. It records -- most of the time. Other times it gets tired and doesn't want to look up to the sky to see the satellites to get its position. It is a good thing that I already have my FAI Gold Badge, and that I wasn't setting out for a badge flight of any sort. As for evidence of my flight? Since the Volkslogger wasn' t working, there was no suitable proof of my flight, other than my word for it. (I did get my GPS watch to record most of the flight, though). I wasn't able to upload the flight to the OLC, due to the fact that I didn't logging the flight with my GPS watch until I was airborne and on tow.

Here's a picture of the flight in Google Earth, (Click to get a better view) as viewed from an oblique angle, looking down from 33 miles of altitude. The black shadow is the ground track along the flight. The colored ribbon is for my position, Yellow, orange and red are for various rates of descending flight, blue is steady or climbing flight 0-2 knots. Light-green indicates slightly descending at around 0-3 knots. I put a thumb-tack to indicate where I achieved the maximum altitude over the ground.

Garmin and a Day's Instruction

I have been running regularly for the last year. I happen to be training for my first marathon on Halloween this year. As a reward for all my hard work, I indulged myself with a super-cool gadget. I am now the proud owner of a Garmin ForeRunner 405 -- a nice running watch that has a GPS logger that I got to track my long distance runs more accurately. The wide range of features that this watch boasts are stunning, but I'll stick to the GPS features for now.

I was curious to see if the functionality of the GPS could work well for flight instruction, so I configured it to record a whole day's worth of instruction that I did on a day in August. I exported the day's recordings and managed to export the proprietary Garmin format (which is essentially XML) into a usable format for Google Earth. Once I successfully converted it into a kmz file, I extracted some really nice 3-D views of this day's instruction in Google Earth.

After viewing these flights in Google Earth, I made some screen-shots of the day's flying, and included them below. There was one spot landing approach that was just barely above the ground during the flare, that it appears to have gone underground. This is possibly due to the proximity to the ground was smaller than the GPS's accuracy, or the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data that Google uses for Front Royal's airport is slightly inaccurate at that location. Rest assured, most of the landings were on the grass, some were beyond the expected landing area, some were right on target. (Also note there was a tailwind that day).

The color coding is the rate of climb and descent. If you carefully look at the areas that aren't for takeoff or landing, you can see me walking around, dragging the glider back to the staging areas, doing positive control check, etc. These approaches were all done by solo or nearly-solo students, with no interaction from me about where to be in the pattern.

After seeing this form of display, I'm pretty sure this visualization could be used as an excellent opportunity as a reflection and review resource for students -- especially for the situations when the student doesn't realize that they were out as far and down as low as we said they were.

We Need Net Access!

I've had several people ask me why I haven't been updating this enough. To get this question, it is clear that i didn't complain enough about the spotty connectivity we have here until we get our DSL line set up. Let me begin:

1. There is no DSL in the house
2. There is no phone in the house
3. There are no Starbucks in the area (Well, there is one downtown in Bern)
   
4. There are no stupid neighbors who have left their wireless LAN open.
   
5. There is one network that we can dip into wirelessly.
   
• But there's a few catches
  

Köniz, the neighboring... uh... County (to put it in an American term), has a free wireless Internet. For a little while. And since we live right on the border between Bern and Liebefeld-Köniz, we are just barely in the wireless LAN's region. So this means, in order to get connectivity, one must get closer to the network. This also means that there's not enough oomph to get through the thick brick walls we have here. So in short, this means that the laptop must be on the balcony, or the wireless connection must be outside somehow.

Even if on the balcony, the signal drops out on all the laptops but Stacy's. The City wireless LAN isn't infinitely available. They have an hour-long duration per login. If after that one hour expires, you have to log in again. This can make web surfing sucky. It makes doing work for my office even harder; as each time the signal drops to zero, or each time the login expires, the VPN tunnel collapses, and I have to go through the tedious process of re-logging in through the wireless LAN, and re-constructing the VPN Tunnel.

Don't get me wrong, it's been really great having this wireless LAN to leech off of. But I would rather have had my own network, instead of having to leech. Soon this will be over.

The embarrassing photo the upper right shows the USB connection to the wireless adapter I had (good thing it was sitting around in my packed luggage), connecting my Linux laptop to the City WLAN.

The saga of getting the phones set up has required multiple calls to Swisscom, and several visits from an electrician. I'm not exactly sure what the difficulties were, but it appears that getting phones set up in a new building is quite a chore.

Now for something different:
I have been asked why my blog has so many religious advertisements. If you know me, I would never go into a church unless there is a funeral, wedding (and only for somebody I would really like. ) Please make sure to type the URL correctly. pietbarber.BLOGSPOT.COM, not pietbarber.LOGSPOT.COM. The guy on that site is a kook.

The Great Toe Episode
On 4 August, around midnight local time, Jake closed the balcony door over his right foot. This resulted in some sharp knife-like object slicing his baby toe pretty seriously. Seriously enough, that Stacy (the Registered Nurse), decided that he needed to go to the hospital. -- But we don't have a car!

So we had to call for an ambulance. The equivalent of 911 in Switzerland is not universal. You have a special emergency code for each Gemeinde (think of a Gemind like a county). In the case of Bern, that number is "144"

It's a good thing I speak German, because the guy on the phone at 144 didn't speak English. I've never been trained in German, how to order an ambulance to your residence, so it was winging it all the way. I didn't know the words for hospital or ambulance or even "toe" (so the word for foot had to suffice. (Actually, I did end up knowing the word for toe, but wasn't sure enough to say it in the conversation, so I didn't want him to think that Jake cut off his earlobe)).

An ambulance came about 7 or 8 minutes later. By that time, I had carried Jake downstairs on my back. The elevator was just a few inches shorter than the width of his knees extended on each side, and as I entered the elevator, both knees banged into the side of the elevator doors. Upon exit, the same slapstick was repeated. One of the ambulance technicians, (a very attractive woman), approached, and spoke perfect English. After a call to downtown headquarters, the two EMTs, Stacy and Jake got into the ambulance and rushed away.

I stayed home with the sleeping children.

Jake ended up getting three stitches, and has no signs of infection 6 days later. We visited a Pediatrician's office on Monday, who said all looks good.

Other Adventures in Health Care
At the same time we had Jake taken to the doctor for the follow-up visit, we had to take Joey to see a doctor, due to what was clearly a case of conjunctivitis. What wasn't clear, was if it was viral or bacterial. We met the English speaking pediatrician who had excellent bedside manner, and determined that Joey was just suffering a viral infection. Good news, no drama of the forcing antibiotics onto the kid for 10 days. There's Jake's ambulance to the right. Yes, it was dark, remember.

Still no Car
Somehow we're making it without a car. Getting the groceries home is a chore, and it looks like the trip to Ikea isn't going to be possible without a car. But outside of that, if we rented a car, it would site idle for 400 CHF a day. (yikes)

Furniture
On Saturday, Stacy dragged me out of bed to go to Otto's, (...kind of like a Target back home, but with lots of furniture upstairs) she was sure that it was to close at 12:00. (It didn't, it closes at 16:00). There, I looked at desk furniture that I didn't like. (sigh) I guess my pickyness is going to force me to go to Ikea, after all.

Speaking of Pickiness
We are making huge strides in getting Cecilia to eat something other than the four food groups: Chocolate, noodles, Macaroni, and Chicken Nuggets. On Monday evening, we decided to go out to dinner at Eigerplatz, at a new restaurant. We all enjoyed the dinner; I especially enjoyed the Paulaner Hefeweissbier. Stacy had some sort of Spaetzle dish, Jake enjoyed a 250g steak. Cecilia did eat just a plate of noodles, and some chicken, but at least it was chicken that didn't come in the form of a nugget.

Internet and Phone Saga
Finally, after many phone calls, several trips to the house by a registered electrician, and getting to know the girl at Swisscom's front office by first-name basis (Melanie), we have gotten the house set up with Internet access. All of the laptops in the house can talk to the printer, and Jake no longer has to sit out on the balcony to play on the Internet.

Walking the Town Like Tourists
On Wednesday, there were no appointments, everybody was reasonably healthy, we set out to downtown Bern to see the sights of the city. Also on our agenda was to climb Gurten, the local high hill. We started with a short train ride into town, and started walking the streets. We made our way all the way down to the American Embassy. The orange line shows our path. The trip began at the main train station at the top-left of the map.

Along the way, we found two nice playgrounds, one with the biggest slide I have ever seen (near the bridge) the other with a great little man-made creek running through it.

Second Day in Switzerland

BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP.

I was roused from my deep slumber with the most annoying noise ever.

BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP.

My stupid laptop! Apparently, I managed to fall asleep without plugging in my laptop. I darted over and plugged it in to my make-shift universal plug to stop the noise. 2:21 AM. Dangit. I'm wide awake now. I immediately went back to bed and stared at the ceiling for a while.

I eventually got back to sleep, but was awoken at about 0430 by a bar-fight that broke out below my hotel room. Or maybe it was just an argument. Since I don't know French, maybe it was just a heated discussion about the best football team. I wished I knew French so I could hear what they were arguing about. The volume made me regret that my window was wide open. I tried to get back to sleep, but it didn't happen.

I showered and got dressed, and started catching up on e-mail. It was just past bed-time for the US, so I just missed Stacy. I decided to do some mundane work for the flying club -- getting all of the flights for the past 6 months inserted into the flight log database. That should have gotten me to sleep for sure, but -- No.

It was 6:30, and tummy started telling me that it's time for food. I wandered around downstairs to find that nothing's open yet. I returned to my room to pout. At 0700, promptly I went to the complimentary breakfast.

Oh was this wonderful! I never have had Frosted Flakes that were so tasty. It's not that the Frosted Flakes were especially delicious, but because i put the only sort of white liquid that was available, and it wasn't the typical soy milk that I'm used to. I was confronted with a blast of sweet creaminess, the soft delicious taste of full cream. A typical European thing is to also have cold-cuts for breakfast. I was rather suspicious about the four different varieties of things from which my kids would surely flee in terror. With each of these strange meats, I was same with the same fatty deliciousness that I experienced with the dairy cream on the Frosted Flakes.

I tried some of the local cheeses for breakfast (another European thing), and found myself really enjoying the croissant. I experimented with one of the small yogurts, enticed by the beautiful peach on the packaging. As I savored each spoon-full, I read through the ingredients, only to be horrified that there were hazelnuts in this yogurt. Hazelnuts?!? Barbarians!

I enjoyed the very strong coffee, and prepared for my journey to Bern. I did not eat much more than a usual, but I was certainly satisfied.

Yesterday, as you know, I flew into Bern Flughafen. So now I am quite familiar with the procedure for how to use the trains to get to the airport. I am also familiar that the Belp Bahnhof is not directly next to the Belp Flughafen (The train station, and airport, respectively). Upon arrival at Belp Bahnhof, I realized that the bus schedule showed the next bus arriving 45 minutes from my arrival. I look at the map, decide it can't be that bad of a walk, and head off on foot.

As I'm walking, I was wishing I had a bike. I was "turbo-walking" as I usually do, and passed some slow natives strolling the sidewalks. I stopped at a grocery store to buy a liter bottle of water. The fellow at the cash register was speaking to me, but not in a language that I understood. (more on this in a moment).

I found my way to the glider operation, and followed somebody onto the airport grounds. I immediately found the duty officers, and promptly introduced myself, (In German). Their ears perked up when I noted that I was a flight instructor in America, and relocating to Fribourg, and I was immediately introduced to the club president, Ed.

Ed bragged that he didn't speak English, so we continued our conversation in German. He has a very thick Swiss accent, but he managed to use only Hochdeutsch when speaking with me. I think I comprehended about 70% of what he was talking about. This isn't bad, especially considering that I have not spoken German for more than 3 sentences at a time for almost 17 years. (ya, really). Also not bad considering that I never knew any German airspace or aviation terms when I was originally learning German.

After explaining to me the recent changes in the airspace around the airport, and how the glider operation now had to contact the control tower for landing and takeoff permissions, I asked to see an airspace map of Switzerland. Given that there are so many chunks of airspace that are un-flyable by gliders, I remarked that the airspace looked like "Swiss Cheese"

He did not get the joke. Maybe it was my delivery. Maybe the Swiss are tired of all the cheese jokes (and along with it, all the jokes about trains running on time, pocket knives and watches). Maybe they don't call it Swiss Cheese. I don't know. But I'm making a mental note that the Swiss don't get Swiss Cheese jokes. I will certainly reserve the pocket knife jokes for maximum comedic effect, i.e. when some fellow Americans are around.

I was introduced to the other Ex-pat in the club, Sandra, a Canadian who has been living in Bern for 19 years. I spoke, and Sandra spoke, and Ed remarked, "Well, they sound exactly alike!" making fun of mine and Sandra's North American accents. To be honest, Sandra had vastly superior German speaking skills, especially when speaking the local dialect.

I was warned that Swiss German was difficult to understand. "Yeah, yeah" I always thought. "It'll be like listening to somebody with a really thick Scottish or Texan accent. I'll be able to manage."

Wrong.

It is really not fair to describe Swiss German as German at all. I'm not sure why they call it German. Here is the scenario: I'm talking with one of the natives about any random subject. My comprehension rate is hovering somewhere between 80 and 90%. The conversation now includes a third person, a local, who does not yet know about my American-ness, or my unable-to-understand-Swytszedootch-ness. The local with whom I'm speaking, turns his head to speak to the third party who just joined the conversation. He begins making German-like sounds. My comprehension level drops to 3 or 4% immediately.

I really was not prepared for this. I was warned, but I doubted. Now I believe. If you don't know German, the only way I can describe it is like this: Pretend you are watching a bunch of kids playing guns in the back yard. They are re-enacting WWII, just like all the war movies they've seen. The kids who play the German side make German-like noises. A native German speaker would come into this observation, and realize the children were making German-like sounds, but they had no meaning, and were nothing more than gibberish.

Never before have I been faced with such simultaneous disappointment and triumph at my German speaking skills. I fared terribly when listening in on the locals talking to each other, and I think I did a really good job in the one-on-one conversations. I also realized that I should have read the sailplane terms in German pages first.

Today had a special flight operation going on. Annually, they get a bunch of kids glider flights for a modest fee, hoping to rope them into a new hobby. So this meant that there were lots of 14 and 15 year olds who were using up the gliders and instructors. So I ended up waiting all day to fly. In the time that I waited, I talked to a lot of the people in the club, which is as important a part in the gliding experience, as manipulating stick and rudder.

I met Ruth, who was a relocation consultant, located in the city of Basel. She spoke English to me the whole time (and I didn't mind people speaking to me in German). She gave me lots of advice that would normally be charged at a hundred Francs per hour. I asked her lots of questions, and she gave me lots of stories about subjects that I would never expect. I asked her questions like, "What are these signs on all the buildings, with a big capital "T" diagram?" She had no idea what I was talking about. (See picture to the right. Do you know?!)

I finally got to fly with Kurt, and we went to 1000 meters (about 3000') in the Duo Discus. Flying the Discus is quite easy, I had no problems staying behind the towplane. The bank is a little slower than the ASK that I'm used to, but I didn't seem to have much problem. This Duo Discus was equipped with a FLARM -- a device used to make sailplane-to-sailplane collisions alerted in the cockpit. There was also a Cambridge navigation device.

We flew over the very large hill near the airport. The glider group has this special airspace carved out for them, called "Lima Bravo", which allows them great freedom to roam within the class uh.. I guess it's class "D" airspace next to the airport. It's quite convenient, because the hill is just about the altitude where a glider pilot is reminded that it's time for him to go home. Once the trees start to brush up on the underside of the aircraft's fuselage, they know it's time to make their way to the pattern. In such a circumstance, it is important to call the airport first and get permission to land.

The terrain around the area can not accurately be described by Google Maps, so I will ask you to take a look at an oblique view of the area with Google Earth. (click to get a better view). the landing area, quite small, shown in red. The takeoff runway is quite long in purple. The approximate ground track for our aerotow is shown as the long purple line. The yellow line is the ground track for the landing that Kurt did.

I recorded a video while Kurt did the landing, but it is too big, and this inferior operating system of Windows makes it very hard to convert into a different, less huge format. Currently, the video is 152 megs, and Youtube only allows 100 megs maximum.

The flight was very late in the day, but quite enjoyable. In order to solo here, I'll have to get my license set up with the Swiss FAA (called BAZL), and I'll have to get really comfortable with the procedures at this airport.

I feel that the language barrier -- me not knowing their local dialect, is really going to be a burden.

They have some different procedures in their club. At the beginning of the day's operations, they have a 5 minute meeting in their clubhouse -- mandatory. At lunchtime, they have another mandatory lunch meeting. At the close of operations, they have a final meeting to ensure that all items are wrapped up. Of course, the meeting was all in the local dialect, so I had no idea what they were saying. I think I picked up 7 or 8 words in the whole briefing. :(

Here's the slide show of my flying for that day (Make sure to click on it)