Learning to Fly

Test Drive

After a few weeks of work with no chances of flying, I was amped to have Easter weekend to catch up. The second round of the São Paulo state championship is also being held over the weekend so I decided I should enter myself to see if I could pick up a few tips from flying with the top guns.

Daniel and I got up the ramp just after 10am and there was already trouble with the competition transports trying to get the 80 pilots entered in the event up the hill. The weather was overcast but there was a solid northeasterly blowing so Daniel took off straight away and flew a few laps along the ridge.

I went to talk to the guys organizing the competition and picked up my kit and got the waypoints uploaded to my GPS. I then waited around for another couple of hours talking to the guys until I decided it was taking too long to get started and I should at least take Thiago’s wing (Sol Ellus II M, DHV1-2) for a test drive seeing as I have been waiting since January to do so.

I hooked it up to my harness and inflated it with no troubles, and took off in an instant. I was expecting the wing to behave a little differently so I stopped myself from diving right into a hard turn off the bat and waited ‘til I had a little altitude first. I then swung my bodyweight to the left and it went into a turn as expected. It was quite moderate so I then went a little further out from the ridge and tried doing some wingovers. It behaved well but on the second one I felt the right wing tip soften and fold up. I realised it was going to need a little more correction than my DHV1 wing.

I pulled in some big ears and found that I had to be much more deliberate in popping them out again, but the wing behaved very well throughout the manoeuver without any trouble at all. I then tried a few dolphin dives and then a spiral. I noticed that to exit the spiral I had to be a little more determined, but no great difference was obvious. After flying around for a little more than 10 minutes I decided I should land as I could see the competitors getting briefed for the competition flight and I didn’t want to be late.

I tried and tried to get low enough to top land on the ramp but couldn’t seem to get low enough, even with ears pulled in. The wind wasn’t actually that strong but the wing just didn’t want to descend. After flying back and forth above the ramp for nearly 10 minutes I decided it was too late anyway as everyone was getting ready to take off for the competition and so I headed over to the northeastern landing spot and spiralled my way down to it. I noticed on appraoch that I had to be much lower too, as the wing wouldn’t drop as quickly as my Prymus usually does, and I didn’t want to overshoot.

I landed softly and folded it up as quickly as possible to try and make it back up in time for the race start. Guto and Daniel landed beside me though and we all packed up our gliders and waited for Thiago to drive Guto’s ute down. We were pretty quick, but before we left we could see all the 80 pilots taking off in quick succession. They looked like termites coming out of a mound all racing around in circles. As we climbed into the back of the ute we could see the leaders already had enough height and were making their way over the backside of the range.

On the way up I got hit in the face by a bee which stung me in the left cheek. Being allergic I had an antihistamine pill in my pocket which I took and then got some cream from the sickbay on the ramp when I got there which seemed to control the swelling.

The race seemed to be well underway, and I asked the organizers if I could still participate or if the take off window had closed. They said I could take off until 2:10pm which meant I had 15 minutes. I raced to program the route’s 2 waypoints A00 and A11 into my GPS and prep my wing. I took off with only a couple of minutes remaining and rose straight up in the lift to mark the first waypoint. The second waypoint, and the finish were at the tollgate just past Pinhal. I had never flown that far before and the conditions weren’t good but I wanted to get away from the ramp and all the people there as my face was hurting and my mood was rapidly becoming less than sociable.

I flew back and forth along the front of the ramp for quite a while but there was little chance of getting high enough to go over the back. I decided to fly along the right side of the ridge toward Andradas and managed to get about 100m above the ridge for a bit but not quite enough to think about going over it so I followed it right to Andradas and went through the gap to the city. I lost a lot of height going through the gap and never hit any real thermals after that so it was a pretty short flight from then on. I managed to get to the roundabout at the entrance to Andradas, but was a good 18km short of Pinhal and the finish line where I landed. I wasn’t too worried though as I could hear all the other pilots reporting in on the radio and it seemed that only 2 of the 80 had actually made it there.

I hadn’t done too well in the comp but I had learnt how to use some important functions on my GPS and got to try out a more advanced wing, so progress was made, and I went home happy.

Total flight time: 1h10m