Session #13

Date: June 1, 2016

Cummulative flights to date: 19

Site: Kiwanda

Conditions: Shirt sleeve weather, gentle breeze, did not need to secure wing as I set up.

Harness configuration: bare glider

Assistance: none

Launch: steep sloping dune in approximately 12mph somewhat steady breeze

The flight: Walked tail to the breeze on the way over to the dune without too much difficulty. Forgot the bare root diagonals so had to use the faired ones making it difficult to keep from bumping the fairings with my helmet otherwise it presented no problem. I think I can reasonably fly with these in place as long as I'm not needing to carry the glider 300 yds and then climb a steep dune backwards.

I am guessing I had about a 12mph breeze at the top of the dune where I launched. I was launching for the first time with nothing but the shoulder harness to carry the glider. I kicked up right away with no trouble other than a fairly significant pitch up which I was able to correct quickly by moving both feet well over the leading edge. I felt I was flying plenty fast but also felt like I was getting a very good glide out of the path I chose. I will have to get some experience doing this to really develop some finess and get it so I minimize the pitch changes. All in all the glider seems very easy to control on launch, during launch, in flight and landing. I started to carry back to my tarp which I flew way past and then thought “mission accomplished”, no need to go do this again here so I just carried on out to my car and packed up.

Landing: I ended up staying in the feet up position until I was about 10ft off the ground and as soon as I dropped down the nose came up rather quickly and I think I counteracted it with pressure forward using my arms or just moving a bit forward in the cage. Ran it on a few steps to a stop.

Conclusions: After feeling like this had been so easy to do, I neglected to analyze my experience today more carefully. I am really wanting to be ready to go inland and launch off something that will give me some time in the air to really fly the glider. At this point I make the critical error of deciding that I can safely launch the glider from Dog Mtn which is a ramp launch with a huge, wide open LZ and about 1500ft vertical. It is about 3 hours north of where I live. I had already made one trip up there with the intent to fly and aborted the idea after driving all the way up there, setting up the glider at launch and then started thinking things through. I decided it was too big of a risk since my only experience at that point had been flying with the leg harness arrangement which I learned from session #12 that my arms wouldn't last all the way down to the LZ. I had rigged up the hammock harness arrangement and realized I was about to take a risk of doing two things I had not yet practiced; 1) fly using the hammock and 2) launch off a ramp. The conditions were also unstable so I expected to get some turbulence which was also something I had not yet experienced. I packed up and went home which was a good decision.