Oz Report

Towing and teaching at Blue Sky

Keep running (Blue Sky, Virginia)

Last Wednesday Steve Wendt had a new student, George, a former Scottish farmer with a noticeable accent, come out for his first lessons.  I wanted to see Steve do some more instruction and this was a great opportunity for me to help out and see how things went.  All and all they went pretty well.

What interests me most is the little details, the small things that add up to a safe and enjoyable training session.  Steve's operation has an admirable safety record and that doesn't come about by accident, so to speak.  You have to do many small things right to make it work.

When I write the term "scooter tow" that covers a multitude of sins.  It's two words that every one thinks they understand and often they wonder what the big deal is.  But it is how Steve runs his particular version of scooter towing, how he runs his flight park (meticulously), how he instructs that makes all the difference.  There are thousands of ways to run a scooter tow operation and do it unsafely and have an unsuccessful business.  Using scooter towing as an instruction method is just the first step in a multi-step process on the road to be successful.

Steve had his 50 cc scooter out for these early lessons.  The only point of these first lessons is to be able to keep the student near the ground so that they can't get too high and hurt themselves.  The student loves it when his/her feet get off the ground, and a couple of feet in the air is plenty for them to realize that they are flying.

The student's first lessons were going well, on his second flight he made it as far as the cone (700').  Steve sits on his scooter right next to the student as the line gets tightened up and the student yells "Clear," when he is ready to trot down the grass runway.

One thing we all saw was that George had a tendency to lean forward and hold onto the down tubes with his hands, to keep himself from falling all the way forward.  Once your hands are on the downtubes and you are holding on, you are pulling the nose down and keeping yourself from floating down the course.  This makes it harder for you to stay in the air.

Steve felt that because George is a tall guy maybe the training harness isn't proportioned correctly for him.  He's noticed this tendency of the taller guys to lean forward, when they should just be hanging by their straps in the harness off the carabineer.  He lengthened the setting on the leg loops and moved George up a loop on the step hang loop to see if that helped.

I mentioned to George that he should keep running throughout the whole tow.  This is something I saw Steve Pearson's daughter do.  You can see it here: http://ozreport.com/11.085#0.  George went along with that advice and it greatly helped.  Whenever he kept running, he stayed vertical and kept the weight off the down tubes and on the carabineer.

When ever he quit running he would start to lean forward and pull the nose down.  Still I think Steve was correct in his evaluation that he needed to sew a different length beginner's harness to handle the bigger guys so that they will naturally hang correctly without the tendency to lean forward.  Steve makes these harnesses for Kitty Hawk Kites and other instructors.  It was great to see this feedback in action.

Steve has so much experience at this that he could see that George was cross controlling and this made it difficult for him to get the glider to correct from a turn to the left or right.  There were light winds during the lesson, but they were just enough to push the student around a bit and make it so he had to correct for the winds.  I could barely see the mistakes that George was making when he cross controlled..

We were towing on the long grass runway with 2000' of spectra tow line out around a turn around pulley.  The runway is plenty wide, but there is a wheat field (18" high) on the right side and soy beans (a couple of inches high) on the left.  The wheat was a hazard, especially for a former wheat farmer like George, who said that he wouldn't be too happy if a hang glider pilot landed in his field.  With the wind often coming from the left, and George having a tendency to release from his left hand first when he rotated from the grapevine to the bottle grip, George was often drifting to the right toward the wheat.  Most often he was able to weight shift and correct.

But, at one point he got himself a couple of feet over the wheat and Steve tried to save him by pulling him back to the left and back onto the runway.  I actually think that this was a mistake on Steve's part.  He should have just dropped George before he got to the wheat by backing off on the throttle earlier.  But after George was over the wheat it was too late for that.

With George pulling down on the down tubes, he pulled the glider down low enough so that the base tube caught in the wheat and he nosed in, bending the down tubes.  all George had to do was let go.  The downtubes were easy to fix, but you don't want to put your students in a situation where they might hurt themselves.  The wheat was a bit of a hazard.

George went on for more tows and worked more on weight shift, but has a ways to go yet.  Steve dropped him to the ground before he got to the wheat.  He got tired also and quit running while flying which had him leaning forward and pulling the nose down.

It's all the little details that make for success or failure.

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It's in the air

Just where are those electrons? (Grand Rapids First Nation) (Union Street Cafe, Sparta, MI)

http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/05/30/manitoba-cellphone.html

"The CBC is reporting that First Nations in Manitoba want compensation for every cell phone signal that passes through their land because it violates their airspace.  The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs recently resolved to negotiate revenue sharing with Manitoba Telecom Services.  Ovide Mercredi of the Grand Rapids First Nations says "When it comes to using airspace, it's like using our water and simply because there's no precedent doesn't mean that it's not the right thing to do." This move may inspire First Nations in other provinces to follow suit."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276720,00.html

A Michigan man has been fined $400 and given 40 hours of community service for accessing an open wireless Internet connection outside a coffee shop without permission of the shop owner.  Under a little known state law against computer hackers, Sam Peterson II, of Cedar Springs, Mich., faced a felony charge after cops found him on March 27 sitting in front of the Re-Union Street Café in Sparta, Mich., surfing the Web from his brand-new laptop.

Discuss Air at the Oz Report forum         del.icio.us

Googling the middle east

Checking up on a distant war. (Mosul, Iraq)

Iraq and neighbors - camels apparently don't need roads.

Google Earth - sites in Mosul: smoking and helicopters.

Discuss Googling at the Oz Report forum         del.icio.us

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