On Tuesday, April 28, 2015 at 8:37:55 PM UTC-7, wrote:
Thanks guys, I appreciate it. Friday was an outstanding soaring day and it was quite fun experiencing one of those magical Spring days everyone talks about. I am fortunate to fly out of Blairstown amongst some really first rate cross country pilots. Everyone has pushing each other to do better and using OLC we can build on each other's flights. It's amazing how fast the entire group is progressing, but even more so over the past year. Within a season, we went from simply getting to a transition, finding a climb and bombing along to expecting to find a line and thermal minimally if at all to make it across. We have been able to start finding patterns where these lines set up in the various transitions and been making more and more use of them. This is a revolution for Blairstown ridge soaring because by optimizing those early upwind jumps, we can really take advantage of our geographic location of being effectively at the NE terminus of the ridge system. I think we will be able to pull off bigger and faster flights well into the future as we keep pushing the boundaries of this great soaring site.

And a huge thank you to Bill Thar for giving me the opportunity to fly your absolutely freakin' awesome machine. That sailplane is a ridge monster!

Best Regards,
Daniel

Congrats!

It was a little hard to tell from the flight tracker, partly because Blairstown appeared to be not at the northern turnpoint, but rather just short of it, but the flight looked to comply with the 28% rule for an FAI triangle. The curve of the ridges plus a few transitions make this work pretty well, so credit also for creative and effective task design. I know how hard it can be to get the FAI rules complied with.

It's not clear to me which of the other 1,000k flights referenced in this thread were FAI triangles. Great accomplishments regardless, but making the FAI proportions work represents an even greater challenge - especially on a ridge flight where it's so tempting to pick a flatter triangle and minimize the up/downwind transitions.

9B