Mark Zivley wrote:

Obviously ridge flight would not be conducive, nor wave, but put enough
data together from cruises during thermal flights and I bet something
could be put together.


No it couldn't for exactly the same reasons ridge and wave don't work. In
typical thermal conditions air is going up and down all over the place.
Skilled pilots tend to fly in the good bits and ignore the bad bits.

Even if you could measure vertical and horizontal airspeed components,
"cruising" is likely to involve frequent speed changes, accelerations and
decelerations.



Papa3 wrote:

Mark,

How do you propose to isolate the impact of vertical air motion? For
instance, I can fly the ridge at 100Kts and maintain altitude (same for
wave
or cloudstreets). I'm sure Rolladen-Schneider (ahem, DG) would love to
publish the L/D of my LS8 from the average of my flights for a season:
"LS8, with a measured L/D of 800:1..."

Cheers,
Erik