Early Autumn Wave
Although it is still summer in many places we have early autumn wave over the Sierra north and south of Minden. Dennis Tito and Elizabeth Tattersall launched into a beautiful dawn sky (photo above) in the DG 1001. Jim Payne and Roger Tanner followed 3 minutes later (photo below) in the ArcusM. Actually the lennies were fairly ragged (below) and low level winds were from the south. Above 12,000 they reported 40 knots of wind from SW. We hope for improving wave through the day.
Jim and Roger saw spotty rotor clouds sorta marking lift near Honey Dry Lake and sent me this photo:
This rainbow from the Arcus near Susanville:
Looking toward SE from Susanville the northern turn point.
Here is the 9am satellite photo from Reno. At 9:30 am Jim and Roger had 450 km. Jim liked the wind profile up to maybe 45,000 feet. He wishes he had that Perlan to try for altitude today. We hope for first flight of Airbus Perlan 2 next month. Lots of blog photos and action at http://perlanproject.org Please look for blog tab on lower right side of Perlan’s home page.
Although there are high lennies from Bridgeport to Bishop, there is a “bad air space” near Topaz Lake in photo above.
So Jim and Roger turned back north to try a 500 km triangle. Here’s a near real time link for their flying http://glideport.aero/map?p=GlidePort:472
At 12:45 they are on track for a 500 km triangle speed record. Air has really dried out so the lennies previously mentioned have disappeared in photo below!
No speed triangle today. Several saves on third leg slowed down the over all speed. Fun anyway. 1100 km at 4 pm.
Jim and Roger are out of turn points and headed home. Wave not consistent so a difficult, but fun day. Photo below is looking at Reno to the south. They have about 1250 km thus far and Roger reports he is having fun on his second wave mission.
Please note the Mark IV (or is it V?) version of Bumper’s yaw string!!! The photo below by Elizabeth shows a lenticular cloud atop another cloud above Minden.
Roger was pretty happy to soar over 1,000 miles (1822 km on See You) for the grand total. For OLC which only scores 6 legs the distance was 1328 km with a 530 km embedded triangle. http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?dsId=4724234
And at the end of the day was a stack of lennies piled like flapjacks for a Minden Aviation Round Up feast.