Oz Report

Mere impressions

The Moyes Litespeed RS4 and the Airborne C4 13.5 (Forbes airfield)

I've been flying a rented Moyes Litespeed RS 4 for the last week and Steve Moyes is going to be flying that very glider in the Forbes competition.  He was test flying it today (the practice day at Forbes).  Today I got back on my rented Airborne C4-13.5 and the gliders are very different.  It's rare to be able for me to be able to fly two different high performance gliders one right after the other, so that I can "feel" the difference.

These two gliders are very different in sail area.  The Airborne C4-13.5 is 146 square feet.  The Moyes Litespeed RS 4 is 152 square feet.  The Airborne C4-14 has a sail area of 154 square feet, so it is more comparable with the Litespeed RS 4.  The Moyes Litespeed RS 3.5 has a 147 square foot sail area so it is the comparable glider to compare with the Airborne C4 13.5.  But the C4 13.5 and the RS 4 are the gliders that the manufactures felt where "right" for me.

The optimal pilot weight for the Moyes Litespeed RS 4 is 172 pounds (I weigh 175).  There is no "optimal pilot weight" given for the Airborne gliders.  Really that value is only a user (pilot) friendly guideline as it is hook in weight that counts.  I hook in at 210 pounds.

The Moyes Litespeed RS 4 (and RS 3.5) calls for a hook in weight of 150 to 240 pounds.  The Airborne C4 13.5 154-220 pounds.  The C4-14 has a hook in weight range of 187-265 pounds.  Four seasons ago I flew the Airborne C2-14 and found it to be way too big for me.  Two seasons ago I flew the Airborne C4-13 and it was a bit small.

As I reported earlier the Moyes Litespeed RS 4 "felt" bigger and "stiffer" in turns and when I flew the C4-13.5 today it felt lighter and smaller and much easier to initiate a turn and to control.  It is pretty clear that sail area is the main differentiator.  I'm happier with the easier to "handle" C4-13.5.  Last season I flew the Moyes Litespeed RS 4 during my whole season in Oz and "felt" fine about it, and actually did well on it, coming in third in the New South Wales Titles.

I also reported a couple of days ago on how slow I was flying in the Moyes Litespeed RS 4.  It seemed that perhaps there was something wrong with me (my harness wasn't fully closed due to zipper problems), my Flytec 6030 (the air speed calibration may have been off), or I was too light on the glider.  Well I checked the 6030 against the car's speedometer and in fact it (the 6030) was reading too high.  So I was in fact flying very slowly.

You can see just how slowly the Flytec 6030 thought I was flying (and I was actually flying 15% slower) here.  Download the flight (IGC file) and bring it up in SeeYou.

I suspect that I was flying so slowly because of my relatively light wing loading.  I'm used to the T2-144 and the C4-13.5 and the accompanying airspeeds were what I was used to.  Perhaps I had additional drag due to my Moyes Matrix Race harness not being in the optimal configuration also.

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Flying over the Ocean

Tomas Weissenberger does some island hoping (Island of Lanzarote, Canary Island)

Alberto <<albertomt>> writes:

Tom Weissenberger was in Lanzarote for a flight vacation.  On the 24th he flew his Moyes Litespeed from Cuchillo (Lanzarote) to Fuerteventura.  He flew fourteen kilometers over the Atlantic Ocean starting at cloud base at 1,200 meters in Playa Blanca "Lanzarote." Total distance was 49 km.

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Australian Outback Romanticism

A cocky's wife (Broken Hill, NSW, Australia)

http://thelees.com.au/musicDiscography.php

New Years Eve we spent at the Forbes RSL (RSL's are "private" clubs with poker machines) listening and dancing to The Lees, a family of Australian musicians originally from Broken Hill, but now living in Parkes, just up the road from Forbes.  As soon as they started playing I knew that they were something special.  There was hardly anyone there to hear them though, although they were well known around Forbes, playing often in the Vandenberg hotel, the meet headquarters.

The father of the family, Steve Lee, told a story about a song that they were about to play.  He had been a postie (mailman) for eight years in Broken Hill, delivering the mail twice a week on a 560 km route.  One day he was out at a station (ranch) talking to the wife of the station owner about one of the dams (ponds) on the station, when the husband said, "Don't talk to her, mate, she wouldn't know anything about it.  She's a townie."

Steve asked the woman, "Is this true?" and she replied, "Yes, it is." Steve asked, "Well, how long have you two been married." "Forty six years," was the reply.

Chorus for The Townie:

But don't be fooled by her disguise
Those city lights are in her eyes
Behind the scares of station life
There's a townie, a cocky's wife.

Check out on Google Earth or Google Maps just where Broken Hill is, and imagine a station 200 km out from there.

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Forbes, day one

There be dragons there (Forbes airfield)

The flight and task.

The Oz Report Oz Weather page comes into its own as Len Paton and I de facto share the weather forecasting duties.  With the RASP and XC Maps, as well as BOM resources I call a strong east wind, 10 knots on the ground 16 knots at the top of lift.  The lift is forecasted to go to almost 8,000' MSL with 500 fpm lift.

It looks like a good day to go far to the west, say 230 km to Rankin Springs, but wait, the locals are saying that the roads are washed out and it is flooded and full of swamps out there.  Their arms are waving in the air.

The task committee freaks and calls a 125 km task just short of Lake Cargelligo thinking that the lake has expanded and maybe the road near it will be under water.  This turns out to be a paraglider task (although not the type of paraglider task that they had in the last Worlds in Australia).

With the the wind strong out of the east (with a hint of south) they are reluctant to send us south west to Wyalong as a turnpoint to keep us by the main highway.  Straight west sends us over dirt roads, but then they are worried about sending us further than Lake Cargelligo, as they think it is flooding out there.

 All this turns out to be way way over blown.  We don't find swamps or lakes or flooding rivers.  We find dust devils, brown fields and lots of lift.

I got off early as usual, in this case an hour before the mandatory start gate (for the top twenty) at 3 PM.  The tug pilot put me a bit down wind in a thermal by myself and I stay by myself for a while trying to zip up harness.  No luck.  One third zipped up on top and one third on the bottom with a hole in the middle.  Oh well, at least I won't fall out of it.

After a while I moved upwind and hooked up with other pilots and we climbed out to 7,500' MSL (we are at 600 feet).  A gaggle of pilots had been blown past the edge of the 10 kilometer start cylinder and they had to come back to join the five of us getting high inside the start cylinder.  The climb was perfectly timed and I got the start gate at twelve seconds after 3 PM.  Jeff Shapiro was in the lead and high with me, but it turned out that he didn't go back far enough to get the start circle.  He didn't know the secret about how to get the Flytec 6030 to display the later start time (in this case the 3 PM start time) and had put in the first start time.  So 18 minutes got added to his elapsed time.

The first glide was 15 km and I lost 4,000'.  I was out in front with Jeff but my glide was not good.  No doubt due to my increased drag (harness open and head pulley).  I saw Gerolf just gliding great, coming from behind us, staying high and getting in front of us.  His glide was magnificent and he flies a Litespeed RS 4 (and he is a skinny guy and he was flying without ballast).  He says it doesn't do him all that much good as if he doesn't find the thermal, he has to go back and join up with other pilots.  Balasz was apparently doing well also.

We worked 400 fpm in the first thermal on course.  We didn't see any swamps and it looked good and dry below.

The next thermal wasn't so friendly.  It was a twenty kilometer glide with a lose of 4,500' down to 1,500' AGL.  We all spread out and had to work broken lift to get back up as we drifted over trees.  It took us a while to find strong lift as at first we were in survival only mode.

After that it was a cake walk with plenty of lift to goal.  At thirty kilometers out we were on final glide but the sink was bad for the next fifteen kilometers.  I took another thermal there and then there was very little sink all the rest of the way in and it was hard to get down.

About forty pilots made goal.  The place was packed (there are 58 in the meet).  I don't know the results yet.

No results yet.  I'll have a URL soon.

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