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Private airport or small field for landout?



 
 
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  #51  
Old May 30th 20, 03:09 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Papa3[_2_]
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Posts: 753
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

Here in the Northeast, I've had good luck with "land in hay, make your day". Ideal is recently mown and/or raked. as the mowers and tedders/rakes are only used in hospitable terrain. Obviously, baled but not collected is a problem. Lots of fields here have the hay baled and stacked/stored alongside the field, including the large, round bales wrapped in white plastic that look like huge marshmallows. When you see that, it's a reasonable bet that the field is kept in hay and should be landable.

One of my favorite landouts happened near Seneca lake where I was hanging on in weak lift between 800 and 1000 feet while the farmer cut my "airport" as I was grinding away. It was a nice, 2000 foot field with fairly tall grass, and when I got there the first pass was probably only a semi-span wide. After 2 passes I was pretty sure it was plenty wide, and by the time I was ready to land he was halfway through pass #3.

He was surprised to find an "airplane" in his field when he turned around to start pass #4, but he warmed up when I offered to help with some of the other chores while I waited for crew. He finished up and met me at the barn where he opened the fridge stocked with Yeungling. I sent him an SSA calendar for Christmas, and we got a nice card from him for several years after that.

P3



on Wednesday, May 27, 2020 at 10:44:14 PM UTC-4, George Haeh wrote:
"Land in the dirt, you won't get hurt" has, so far, worked well for me.

Farmers don't get worked up about crop damage when it's not even an inch high.

With private strips, width can be a deal/glider breaker. I passed up one in the book because the stated width looked a tight squeeze. And I once saw the green (corn) stains on the tips of an 18m self launcher. The owner had the look of a narrow escape on him. The private strips I have used were known to my local club as wide enough for gliders. The owners have been hospitable and happy to talk airplanes. There's the rare one that won't allow aerotow retrieve because of liability considerations.

You can compare the width to power pole spacing.

No matter how hard you study the local fields and airports, the day will likely come when you have to evaluate fields from the air. It's been recommended for aspiring XC pilots to evaluate possible fields from the air and drive over for a look.


  #52  
Old May 30th 20, 08:16 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
2G
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Posts: 1,439
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

On Thursday, May 28, 2020 at 8:00:03 PM UTC-7, Michael Opitz wrote:
At 23:36 28 May 2020, Jonathan St. Cloud

Any real world data? How many of you have broken a glider in a

plowed field? They can be very inviting and many are very good
landing sites, but know your area. I have both seen and worked in
plowed fields that I would not attempt to land in. And I have seen
some beautiful fields.

Jon, that is exactly the point - Real World - The real world is very
different in different places. We had a ton of broken gliders from
landing in plowed fields during the 1985 WGC in Italy. Over there
the soil is clay, and that summer was dry. The clay was so
compacted that the farmers used bulldozers to pull the plows
because the tractors weren't strong enough. The furrows were
sometimes a foot to 1.5 feet deep, and the clods that were tilled up
were large and like boulders. During practice, I landed in one that
had only 6" furrows, but was hard as brick. The jarring caused the
gear handle on my Discus-b to come out of the down detent, and
the gear collapsed, so I wound up sliding on my belly for a short
ways. Klaus Holighaus spent most of the night fixing the small
belly hole himself, and I flew the rest of the contest with a ~1ft
green spot on the belly. Dick Brandt made me a hard rubber wedge
to place in the gear handle track after the gear was lowered in order
to keep the gear handle from popping out again. Our coach, Walter
Neubert, had loaned his brand new ASW-20 to Henri Stouffs of
Belgium. Hernri absolutely totaled it out landing in a plowed field
with deeper furrows and bigger clods. The damage list went on and
on. The bottom line is that not all plowed fields are alike or
landable. It all depends on the the local area, the kind of soil, the
moisture content, the farming methods, the wx, etc. To try and
give someone universal advice that all plowed fields are good off
field landing options is just being way too short sighted for me.
You have to know the local agriculture at the time of year that you
are flying, and then qualify the off field landing options.

RO


But did anybody get hurt? I said "If you land in the dirt you won't get hurt" - I didn't say a thing about the glider. Of course, the glider is usually better off it doesn't hit a fence post or drainage ditch. On the other hand, landing in a pasture with a barbed wire fence will do surprisingly little damage to the glider (like a broken canopy), but might very well decapitate the pilot. You're NOT going to find a barbed wire fence in the middle of a plowed field. Which would you chose?

Tom
  #53  
Old May 30th 20, 08:34 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Charles Ethridge
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Posts: 33
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

Thanks for all your responses.

Reading them over, my take on this is that there is no truly "safe" way to landout in fields or unknown private airports. By "safe" I mean safe for you AND for the glider. I'm not rich enough to afford to keep having a broken glider fixed.

This got me wondering about a couple of things though:

1. Is there an area in the USA where there is a gliderport where pilots fly lots of cross country and which, at certain times of the year also has large, safe fields to land along the known cross country routes? Since I'm semi-retired perhaps I could move there for a summer, just to get my badges and cross country experience.

2. What about the concept I read about (forgot where) about thermaling over a KNOWN landable airport until gaining enough altitude to reasonably get to the next known landable airport? That seems like it might be doable here in north-central Georgia, where there are so many decent uncontrolled airports.

Ben
  #54  
Old May 30th 20, 11:25 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
[email protected]
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Posts: 351
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

Charles, please don’t take the wrong perspective from our posts. Its not true to say there is no safe way to fly xc and that whatever you do carries a high chance of damage to yourself and-or your ship. That is simply not true.

If you do as recommended in learning to land your ship very efficiently, minimum and exact speed control, (your PW can land as short as our 1-26’s, Ive seen it done at the 1-26 Championship/Low Performance contest last year),AND pick routes which have a generous supply of open fields, you can very safely do lots of xc. You don’t need big wings and super high performance ships. In fact, a very good argument can be made that the small, slower speed ships are easier and safer to fly xc given that the availability of landable fields for us is much greater than the 18-20 meter ships.

As for an area where you can climb high enough to go from airport to airport, thats a pretty tall order for a low performance ship. The area you fly around central georgia is very landout-field friendly. You can easily work out a few courses starting with google earth, picking potential landout fields spaced if you like every 10 or even down to 5 mile spacing. Then take a weekend drive and check them out from the ground or get a power plane buddy and fly the route checking them out. Easy piesy, absolutely safe.

If you want to go somewhere to fly xc with an abundance of humongous landable fields, Sunflower aerodrome in KS would be a fine place, or Lawrenceburg IL.

I think you simply need to do a little homework finding out how far you can fly given 2,000 ft of altitude, plan a few simple triangles, practice your short field/spot landing skills, then go for it. You can over think this thing to the point where you end up too frightened to ever go anywhere. Many of us have had first xc/landout jitters but went, did a flight, maybe landed out successfully. And afterwards realized it not such a big scary deal after all.
Dan
  #55  
Old May 30th 20, 11:38 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Eric Greenwell[_4_]
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Posts: 1,939
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

Charles Ethridge wrote on 5/30/2020 12:34 PM:
Thanks for all your responses.

Reading them over, my take on this is that there is no truly "safe" way to landout in fields or unknown private airports. By "safe" I mean safe for you AND for the glider. I'm not rich enough to afford to keep having a broken glider fixed.

This got me wondering about a couple of things though:

1. Is there an area in the USA where there is a gliderport where pilots fly lots of cross country and which, at certain times of the year also has large, safe fields to land along the known cross country routes? Since I'm semi-retired perhaps I could move there for a summer, just to get my badges and cross country experience.

2. What about the concept I read about (forgot where) about thermaling over a KNOWN landable airport until gaining enough altitude to reasonably get to the next known landable airport? That seems like it might be doable here in north-central Georgia, where there are so many decent uncontrolled airports.

Ben

What books have you read about XC flying?

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)
- "A Guide to Self-Launching Sailplane Operation"
https://sites.google.com/site/motorg...ad-the-guide-1
  #56  
Old May 30th 20, 11:48 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Martin Gregorie[_6_]
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Posts: 699
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

On Sat, 30 May 2020 15:25:15 -0700, agcatflyr wrote:

Charles, please don’t take the wrong perspective from our posts. Its not
true to say there is no safe way to fly xc and that whatever you do
carries a high chance of damage to yourself and-or your ship. That is
simply not true.

If you do as recommended in learning to land your ship very efficiently,
minimum and exact speed control, (your PW can land as short as our
1-26’s, Ive seen it done at the 1-26 Championship/Low Performance
contest last year),AND pick routes which have a generous supply of open
fields, you can very safely do lots of xc. You don’t need big wings and
super high performance ships. In fact, a very good argument can be made
that the small, slower speed ships are easier and safer to fly xc given
that the availability of landable fields for us is much greater than
the 18-20 meter ships.

As for an area where you can climb high enough to go from airport to
airport, thats a pretty tall order for a low performance ship. The area
you fly around central georgia is very landout-field friendly. You can
easily work out a few courses starting with google earth, picking
potential landout fields spaced if you like every 10 or even down to 5
mile spacing. Then take a weekend drive and check them out from the
ground or get a power plane buddy and fly the route checking them out.
Easy piesy, absolutely safe.

If you want to go somewhere to fly xc with an abundance of humongous
landable fields, Sunflower aerodrome in KS would be a fine place, or
Lawrenceburg IL.

I think you simply need to do a little homework finding out how far you
can fly given 2,000 ft of altitude, plan a few simple triangles,
practice your short field/spot landing skills, then go for it. You can
over think this thing to the point where you end up too frightened to
ever go anywhere. Many of us have had first xc/landout jitters but went,
did a flight, maybe landed out successfully. And afterwards realized it
not such a big scary deal after all.
Dan

Another way that might work for you is to do the height and duration legs
of silver C first: both can be done with local flying and should be
useful in convincing yourself that you CAN climb more than 3270 ft above
release height and that you can stay up for 5 hours. Then think about
setting a self-declared task of making a flight of more than 50km ending
at a known landable airfield. If you can set a 50km flight over mostly-
landable country and downwind as well, so much the better, and if you've
never visited the destination field that doesn't matter - in fact you'll
learn more if you haven't seen it but just been told is good.

This is exactly how Silver C was done on my club. I did the height and
duration legs soaring locally and then, after getting instructor signoffs
for field selection, field landing practise, and navigation (without GPS
- it was that long ago) I was told to map-read my way to a gliding club
about 65 km away that I had never visited, and land there so I got useful
practise landing at a previously unknown airfield - in fact I sat in a
thermal off to one side to work out the traffic pattern, joined the
circuit and landed there to be offered congratulations and a beer.


--
Martin | martin at
Gregorie | gregorie dot org

  #57  
Old May 31st 20, 05:29 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Dan Marotta
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Posts: 4,601
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

You don't need to climb high enough to reach the next field.Â* A good way
to fly early cross country is to climb and go out on course. Keep the
field you left within reach as you climb and travel to the next field.Â*
When the next field is in reach, you can let go of the previous field
and proceed.Â* Repeat the process from field to field and before long,
you'll be stretching your wings.

Oh, and read Helmut Reichmann's book, "Streckensegelflug" (I hope I
spelled that correctly).Â* It translates to "Cross-Country Gliding". The
best book on soaring that I've ever read.

On 5/30/2020 4:48 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Sat, 30 May 2020 15:25:15 -0700, agcatflyr wrote:

Charles, please don’t take the wrong perspective from our posts. Its not
true to say there is no safe way to fly xc and that whatever you do
carries a high chance of damage to yourself and-or your ship. That is
simply not true.

If you do as recommended in learning to land your ship very efficiently,
minimum and exact speed control, (your PW can land as short as our
1-26’s, Ive seen it done at the 1-26 Championship/Low Performance
contest last year),AND pick routes which have a generous supply of open
fields, you can very safely do lots of xc. You don’t need big wings and
super high performance ships. In fact, a very good argument can be made
that the small, slower speed ships are easier and safer to fly xc given
that the availability of landable fields for us is much greater than
the 18-20 meter ships.

As for an area where you can climb high enough to go from airport to
airport, thats a pretty tall order for a low performance ship. The area
you fly around central georgia is very landout-field friendly. You can
easily work out a few courses starting with google earth, picking
potential landout fields spaced if you like every 10 or even down to 5
mile spacing. Then take a weekend drive and check them out from the
ground or get a power plane buddy and fly the route checking them out.
Easy piesy, absolutely safe.

If you want to go somewhere to fly xc with an abundance of humongous
landable fields, Sunflower aerodrome in KS would be a fine place, or
Lawrenceburg IL.

I think you simply need to do a little homework finding out how far you
can fly given 2,000 ft of altitude, plan a few simple triangles,
practice your short field/spot landing skills, then go for it. You can
over think this thing to the point where you end up too frightened to
ever go anywhere. Many of us have had first xc/landout jitters but went,
did a flight, maybe landed out successfully. And afterwards realized it
not such a big scary deal after all.
Dan

Another way that might work for you is to do the height and duration legs
of silver C first: both can be done with local flying and should be
useful in convincing yourself that you CAN climb more than 3270 ft above
release height and that you can stay up for 5 hours. Then think about
setting a self-declared task of making a flight of more than 50km ending
at a known landable airfield. If you can set a 50km flight over mostly-
landable country and downwind as well, so much the better, and if you've
never visited the destination field that doesn't matter - in fact you'll
learn more if you haven't seen it but just been told is good.

This is exactly how Silver C was done on my club. I did the height and
duration legs soaring locally and then, after getting instructor signoffs
for field selection, field landing practise, and navigation (without GPS
- it was that long ago) I was told to map-read my way to a gliding club
about 65 km away that I had never visited, and land there so I got useful
practise landing at a previously unknown airfield - in fact I sat in a
thermal off to one side to work out the traffic pattern, joined the
circuit and landed there to be offered congratulations and a beer.



--
Dan, 5J
  #58  
Old May 31st 20, 06:49 AM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
2G
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,439
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

On Saturday, May 30, 2020 at 12:34:22 PM UTC-7, Charles Ethridge wrote:
Thanks for all your responses.

Reading them over, my take on this is that there is no truly "safe" way to landout in fields or unknown private airports. By "safe" I mean safe for you AND for the glider. I'm not rich enough to afford to keep having a broken glider fixed.

This got me wondering about a couple of things though:

1. Is there an area in the USA where there is a gliderport where pilots fly lots of cross country and which, at certain times of the year also has large, safe fields to land along the known cross country routes? Since I'm semi-retired perhaps I could move there for a summer, just to get my badges and cross country experience.

2. What about the concept I read about (forgot where) about thermaling over a KNOWN landable airport until gaining enough altitude to reasonably get to the next known landable airport? That seems like it might be doable here in north-central Georgia, where there are so many decent uncontrolled airports.

Ben


The answer is actually pretty simple: you start out only flying cross country on the stronger days when you have an easy glide to known good airports or verified airstrips. Gradually you will build your confidence and will be willing to take more risks. The bottom line is, however, until you have actually landed in a field you will never be confident of your abilities to do so.

Part of the frustration of giving general advice in a forum like RAS somebody will nit-pick you to death. Like, are you expecting to fly gliders in Italy? REALLY?? So WTF does that have to do with what you are contemplating? Answer: NOTHING!

Tom
  #59  
Old May 31st 20, 02:34 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Charles Ethridge
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Posts: 33
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

On Saturday, May 30, 2020 at 6:38:56 PM UTC-4, Eric Greenwell wrote:

What books have you read about XC flying?

--
Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)


Advanced Soaring Made Easy - Bernard Eckey
After Solo - Thomas Knauff
The Soaring Engine - G Dale
Landing Out - The Final Four Minutes - Bob Wander
Winning - George Moffat
That great landout booklet by Kai Gersten that I can't find on the internet anymore...

Just bought Reichmann's Cross-Country Soaring, so starting on that now.

Ben

  #60  
Old May 31st 20, 02:35 PM posted to rec.aviation.soaring
Charles Ethridge
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 33
Default Private airport or small field for landout?

On Sunday, May 31, 2020 at 12:29:21 AM UTC-4, Dan Marotta wrote:
You don't need to climb high enough to reach the next field.Â* A good way
to fly early cross country is to climb and go out on course. Keep the
field you left within reach as you climb and travel to the next field.Â*
When the next field is in reach, you can let go of the previous field
and proceed.Â* Repeat the process from field to field and before long,
you'll be stretching your wings.

Oh, and read Helmut Reichmann's book, "Streckensegelflug" (I hope I
spelled that correctly).Â* It translates to "Cross-Country Gliding". The
best book on soaring that I've ever read.
--
Dan, 5J


Good point!

I just bought Reichmann's book (English version).

Ben
 




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