I guess our personal limits just differ from each other. Of course I
have experienced times when full deflection of the controls would not
stop a rolling or pitching action, but I was never concerned about it
because I kept my airspeed low enough that stall was more likely than
damage. Knowing how to recover from unusual attitudes and being
comfortable with aerobatics may help here.

My roughest wave flights have been in the Rockies, in the Wet Mountain
Valley near Westcliffe, and a bit west of Leadville. To date, what I've
seen around Moriarty, NM has been pretty benign. Note: I've run with
scissors and played with matches and I still have both eyes and all my
fingers. Your results may vary.

On 10/23/2015 8:19 AM, Bob Whelan wrote:
On 10/23/2015 1:26 AM, Tango Whisky wrote:
Am Donnerstag, 22. Oktober 2015 17:27:40 UTC+2 schrieb Dan Marotta:
Rotor is the Boogie Man.

In the Air Force flight training they showed us movies of a B-52 whose
vertical tail had been torn off in an encounter with rotor. I feared
rotor, too, until encountering it for the first time in a glider
with the
airspeed well within the green arc. Yes, it's bumpy, but maintaining
control is a non-event. Using rotor to climb into the wave is
sometimes
the only way to get there. There's a terrific mix of up and down
but, if
you stay on the upwind side of the rotor, the net is up. You climb in
rough air and then, all of a sudden, it becomes silky smooth and the
rate
of climb increases rapidly. What a treat! Having said that, I still
have enough sense not to fly through rotor with the airspeed in the
yellow! Dan, 5J

I can assure you that there are rotors out there where you can't
maintain
control in a glider *at all*, even if you are spiraling with 80 kts.

Bert Ventus cM TW


+1 on TW's observation (my own being from Boulder, CO), though I
always attempted to hold a mere ~60 knots to reduce personal/ship G
loads, accepting whatever "unusual attitude" came my way. Worked for
me. Never been rolled beyond 90-degrees/vertical (against full
opposite controls) or pitched much more than +/- 45-degrees, but when
this - and you're sometimes enveloped in utterly still air just after
an impressive gust of some sort - happens vertically close to the
foothills, it's a real thrill. Apply your own versions of understated
humor to that last...

Bob W.

--
Dan, 5J