Ooo, nice shots. Just wondering, do glider pilots only get one attempt at landing? I mean, if they were off course due to some crosswinds, and they couldn't land, what could they do?

Rich H wrote on Apr 26^th, 2010 at 5:55pm:


Unless you can find more lift, you have to land... somewhere. And even if you find more lift, eventually you'll run out of daylight. 
When you think about it, it's no different than with an engine: sooner or later, you must land. With gliders, it just happens to be sooner, generally speaking.

Cross-country glider navigation is always a question of knowing how much altitude you're likely to lose between A and B, and how fast you need to fly between areas of lift in order to minimize the time spent in "sink". The wind is an important factor in determining all this.

I haven't really gotten into it yet, but I know this much:
A glider flight plan is a flight profile, which is defined as a plan to ensure you have sufficient altitude at all times in order to reach a suitable landing site. There is always an element of chance, but if you pick a day with good conditions and plan your profile well, it will usually work out.

Experienced glider pilots can travel hundreds of miles, returning to their starting point, especially if they are equipped to fly very high. They rarely get to go from A to B in a straight line, however- sometimes you have to stop and look for thermals, terrain-induced lift, or wave lift to get back some altitude before proceeding.


Our club isn't really set up for it, but in many cases, a glider pilot will have a support crew following with a trailer for the glider, in case they do have to "land out" somewhere where they cannot get an aerotow or winch launch to get out. Most gliders are designed for easy disassembly in the field (which usually just involves removing the wings and horizontal tail planes), to allow them to be trailered.

As far as the individual landings go, unless you have a lot of very  good lift right at the airport, you get only one shot- no go-arounds. In a crosswind situation, you just have to time your turns with the wind in mind, maintain a good approach speed, and crab, crab, crab.... in the pattern and on final, all the way to touchdown. It's not that difficult, especially if you have the wisdom to not go flying in the first place when the crosswind is beyond the limits of pilot and glider ( 10 knots right across the runway is about the limit for me in the 2-33). If you're actually planning to land at some other airport, it is wise to have as much info about conditions there as possible, just as it is with power flying.

With the low clearance and long wings, side-slipping doesn't work very well, but this is why most gliders have a monowheel main gear- allows you to use the rudder to straighten out at the last moment, wings level. the tailwheel in the 2-33 rarely touches the ground during a landing; even with 2 aboard, it "wants" to come to rest on the nose skid. This arrangement allows quite  a bit of side-loading if you happen to be drifting a bit when you touch down, and also makes it easier to pivot using the rudder while rolling out, even in a stiff crosswind. Most gliders also can be flown quite slowly, which means tighter turns and short rollouts... so even landing out in a pasture or something is not as big a deal as with most power planes.


This clip is pretty educational... the pilot, who is a making a long x-c in a high-performance glider with a lot of helpful gadgets like an audible vario and glide computer, explains a lot of what he is doing.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSp4ZyZ_x9k

patchz wrote on Apr 27^th, 2010 at 4:53pm:

Ever heard of cross sensory modality?  The Auditory variometer gives you flight information through sound so you can direct more of your visual attention outside the airplane where it should be when flying a glider.

There have been some pretty cool recent developments in this area.  I read a paper the other day where anesthesiologists used sound to keep them informed of the patients vital signs.  In many ways it is better than an alarm because you can track trends.

In another paper attitude information was provided through an in cockpit music system, and they found the pilots could actually maintain control and hold a course and pitch by sound only (although they didn't encode the airspeed, just attitude).

The Ruptured Duck wrote on Apr 28^th, 2010 at 12:09pm: