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.

Frankfurt TDY

I'm currently assigned 2 weeks worth of work in Frankfurt, Germany. I'm here with 5 other co-workers, and most of the time we do on these trips is spent in a very inhospitable environment -- a computer data center.

If you've never been in one, they are not so bad for the first few hours, but after 10 hours a day, they really wear on the soul. By the third day or so, we usually shout, "Booo! Datacenter! Boooo!" Some of the work is quite manual and blue-collar. We take the shipments of the new servers, unpack them, collect all of the packing materials, break down the cardboard, stack the new computer servers in a stack. Usually on the second day, we rack them and stack them into the appropriate places in the rack. It is not unlike a very large Lego construction project.

By the third day, we are plugging all of the power plugs into the right places, and starting to plug in the network cables into all the servers. This usually lasts until Friday, when we are done with most of the physical work, and start doing the logical work. Installing operating systems, updating BIOS, etc. Since there are more than 100 servers at a site, it is quite an undertaking!

As I said before, the life in the data center is quite the harsh, inhospitable environment. The cold aisles -- where all the incoming dry, air-conditioned air blows into the data center is cold and uncomfortably dry. All of the computers face the same way, and output the hot air out the back of the servers. On the side of the aisle where all of the hot air is blown out is called the "hot aisle". It is a nice place to warm up, for when you spend too much time in the cold aisle, but the air is even more dry and uncomfortable.

It's a good thing we get a little free time to get away from this inhospitable environment!

Of course, I spend my time running. Since I am now at the point in my marathon training program where I am doing peak mileage, I have to find some nice places to run. Unfortunately, our hotel is in the outskirts of Frankfurt -- in a suburb called "Nordwest Zentrum", which is also the location of a very nice shopping mall. We never saw such a shopping mall in Switzerland, except in Zürich. I'm sure that if there was such a place to shop in Switzerland, Stacy would have liked the experience of living in Swizterland much more than she already did.

Unfortunately, Nordwest Zentrum is quite far away from the data center, and doesn't have much of a night life. There are only two restaurants open after hours, and quite frankly: We've used them up and are quite tired of them. (We get back from the data center quite late sometimes, and if there's nothing open, we starve!) Fortunately, it's not far from some really good running routes. It didn't take long for me to discover that going East or South will take me directly to a tributary to the Main river in Frankfurt, called the Nidda.

The Nidda has a running/biking/hiking trail that follows it for miles and miles. This Saturday, we took the day off to get some recharge time. I took the morning to sleep in, and then started on my journey after noon. Here's my GPS watch's record of the run, up until the point where the battery ran out.



Along the way, I found this absolutely lovely spot to refill my water supplies. For these long runs, I need to bring along a lot of water, for there is no telling how much I will be able to refill along the way. Along the southern route, there is nothing to drink, and there wasn't any water fountains anywhere to be found for seven miles going north. Just north of the town of Bad Vilbel, I found a fountain.

At first glance, this fountain was just like many of the water fountains with potable water are easily found in Switzerland. An exception to this is that one must press a button to get water from this fountain, where the Swiss fountains were free-flowing all the time. I had a water bottle that wasn't quite empty yet, so I emptied it out, and filled it up.

As I was about to cap the water bottle, I looked carefully into the bottle, and noticed lots of things floating in it. Thousands of tiny white things, and some brown flecks swirling around the bottom. At this point, I wasn't so sure if this was a good idea to pour out my perfectly good water, and replace it with this questionable water. I looked around to see if any of the locals were laughing at me, or horrified to think that this person could be filling up his water bottle with this well-known potable water. I saw no such thing.

I looked around and found this sign:
The first few sentences of the sign say that there is a significant amount of iron in this water. Also, I recognized the brand name of the fountain -- it's the same brand-name of the water that you get in the restaurants around Frankfurt! I've already drunk many bottles of Hassia while taking a break at the data center, so I was already familiar and fond of the taste of Hassia sparkling water. Since Hassia is sparkling water, that would explain the zillions of tiny white things floating in my water -- they were tiny sparkling bubbles of CO2. Here is a picture of a local filling up his water bottle with

For the first tenth of a mile after the re-fill, my water bottle hissed from the agitated carbonated water, as it spilled all over my running belt. It never occurred to me that carbonated water would do that on a run, since I've never run with carbonated water before. In any event, the carbonated water lost most of its zing after a few miles, and was not bubbly and sparkly by the time I consumed the rest of it for the remainder of my run.

The run was 19 miles in total. That's the longest I've gone yet. I could have gone another few miles for sure, but since the majority of the trail is made of gravel, my feet -- wearing the Vibram Five Finger Sprints, were pretty much done for the day. My legs still had miles left, but the feet did not.

The marathon training plan called for only 18 miles, and this is my planned maximum amount of mileage per week. I'll repeat this week's run plan on the next week, then I will start what's called "the taper", where the mileage drops off significantly in preparation for the marathon. The Marine Corps Marathon is 31 Oct 2010. According to different calculations, since I'm running 35 miles per week, at my weight I'm burning between 4000 and 7000 Kcal per week. Once I start the taper, reducing to 20 then 15 miles per week, I'll have to make sure that I reduce the intake appropriately.

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.

More Minimalist Running

This is a really great video, echoing all of the things I rave about, when I talk about running without marshmallow shoes. Just watch and see.