—–01-01-2014—–
WISHING YOU A HAPPY , HEALTHY and SAFE NEW YEAR
During the final party of the Nationals in 2011.
A late morning , sorry about that.
After the bubbles [ of course I had to toast on my New Zealand friends , then on my Aussie mates and Japanese friends and then on my European friends , waited even till I heard the 12 bangs from the BIG BEN in London at for me 1 in the morning to toast ” with” my UK mates and it takes today to lift my glass of bubbles on my USA and Canadian friends and last but not least my friends living in Hawaii] ] and good food, along night and lot’s of fireworks [ beautiful better then ever before here in Alphen but sometimes a bit TOO loud] , where I stay far away from as I don’t want them TOO close, it’s time for the first blog of the year 2014.
Take a chair, a full cup of coffee or tea and enjoy, as I also share a blog from another blogger , already since 2008 , Branco! He shared his competition adventures in one blog [WGC in Chaves and Serbian Nationals] and his gliding in Brazil from Bahia, in another one.
I asked him to contact me again when he had more news. After 3 months he finished the next article , so we get all the in’s and out’s from the new-born-resort Bahia .
Thank you for sharing it with me Branco and for that reason with many others.
Have to start as a Formula 1 fan, with a word of sadness about what happened to Schumi. After so many dangerous Formula 1 races, he nearly killed himself with skiing [ off- piste, to be honest] with his 14 year old son, on a sunny morning in the mountains from France. Hope he survives and when,..in a good condition.
And on the more funny site I had to smile about how Google -earth looks at the soaring activities at Corowa as seen by Jan and shared on FB and the reaction from co-owner Grietje.
Their Soaring Center is categorized as” erotic” and her reaction;” That should bring more people here” and ” Thanks for letting me know, I can anticipate on it now”.
Great answers!
And look at Frank the oldest son from Francesco and Grietje, with a nostalgic hat from their good times, years ago at Sportavia ! Frank surely waits a great career in soaring/flying!!!
Pictures to be seen at; http://www.australian-soaring-corowa.com/
The ” worst ” distance on the OLC page ONE on December 30 was 676 km. in a discus BT, from 46 added by the pilots!!! That is just good again!
What a season!
On December 30;28 x a 1000 from different fields and 9 x over 900 km..
Most of them in top gliders but still,…..! They are there to be used and as we can see already distances are getting BIGGER.!!!!!
On the last day there were 2 over 1.300 km. is the 1.300 km. the the new ” magic-1000- target” we were used too and longed for ??? And 4 over 1.200 km.
The West Australian State comps finished yesterday with 4 days and Terry Cubley as winner in the open class in his LS 3.
In club it was Steven Cesco in the Libelle 201b, who won.
The Aussie club and sports class Nationals start on Friday from Waikirie.
” The Sports Committee has decided to make a change to Sports Class this year to try to attract more entries.
Gliders will be able to fly ballasted using the Multiclass handicaps.”
It is hot 40 dgr. NOW and 8/8 of cu’s! Weather to swim instead of fly, but it will change.
And WOW , the end of the year 2013 ends with a BIG BANG; That EPIC flight by Jim Payne ,and his co-pilot from Argentina, Juan Pagano, in the DG 1001M, as it is a long ” sit” [ 14 hours and 36 minutes!] and for this moment another part of HISTORY!!!
As he said; ” finally the BIG WAVE, we came for! ” Flown from Nahuel Huapi over 5 TP’s .
2.700 km with that huge speed of 184.90 km./h.
It’s not a new world record as that’s still in the good old hands of Klaus Ohlman, who flew in 2003 a distance of 3008 km in 14 hours and 58 minutes on January 21 from Chapelco in Argentina. What a sit must that have been too in the NIMBUS 4DM!!!!!!
Jim’s FULL comment is to be read on the OLC!
On the very last day of 2013, Lake Keepit had the best flight in Australia with 666 km. in an LS 6!!!Worldwide it was the NIMBUS 4DM with 2 Swiss pilots Rainer and Bernhard flying 1.329 km. with a speed of 144 km./h from Bitterwasser.
Michael Sommer did about the same from Pokweni in the EB 28.
It’s interesting to read that some pilots who have not flown before in Africa, can’t believe how after a day of huge thunderstorms, the next day is a 1000 k-day again.Never been there but I guess that’s Africa,with it’s strong weather both with great clouds and CU nimbs. It does n’t work like that in Holland. After a day of strong rain , tasks the next day are normally small[er].
In 2013 I wrote about flying at, what some call , the new premier gliding resort in Brazil.
Here is the story with pictures from Branco Stojkovic ,who was so lucky to fly there last year.
Branco making pictures with a GoPro.
I copied and pasted it but one way or another, it does n’t look too good in real with the space between, though my draft is perfect. Sorry about that. If you wish you can go to the link and read the story there with even more pictures.
Enjoy!
http://brankosbahiagliding.blogspot.ca/
An Update on the Bahia Gliding Resort
Back in late 2012 these seemed (to me) to be very ambitious plans and Gugui’s target date of September 2014 for setting up a fully functioning gliding resort looked a bit optimistic. Fast forward to September 2013, half way to the target date and my second trip to Bahia and what a difference a year makes! The newly established Bahia Gliding resort is already up and running, and although all of the visiting pilots (save for yours truly) were Brazilians, there was significant progress towards Bahia Gliding becoming one of world’s premier gliding resorts.
The resort already has its own airfield, located within the bounds of the “Alcatraz” farm (soon to be renamed to Albatroz, which in Portugese means Albatross) just outside of LEM, off the BR-020 road leading South to the nation’s capital Brasilia, about six hours drive from LEM. You can find it on Google Earth by entering these coordinates: 12°10’12.52″S, 45°48’44.44″W) The current facilities include a 1500 meter long grass runway, an open hangar and a tie-down area that can accommodate at least ten gliders. The current glider fleet includes a Grob 103 Twin II, Blanik L-23, Jantar Standard 2 and a Nimbus 3T. In summer of 2013 Gugui purchased a number of gliders in Europe that will be added to the fleet in 2014. These include another Jantar Standard 2, Jantar 1, Jantar 2B, Standard Cirrus, Open Cirrus, and a PIK 20. He is also looking for a high performance two seater, either a Duo Discus or an ASH-25.
This year the towing operation was conducted with a rented Piper Pawnee, which was more than adequate for servicing the current fleet of four gliders, plus a number of Brazilian pilots who came to do some practice flying prior to the 2013 Brazilian Nationals, which were held in early October at the new LEM municipal airport. Starting in 2014 Bahia Gliding should be operating its own tow plane (an already purchased Zlin Z-37T Turbo Čmelák) and a Tost winch, which is at present at the Bahia Gliding airfield waiting to be overhauled before being put back into service. By the way, the location is ideal for winch operation as the thermal conditions around the airfield are excellent and the reliable “house thermals” can be relied on most of the time. As an illustration, the release altitudes on all nine aero tows I took this year were between 200 and 400 meters QFE.
During my visit Gugui signed a lease agreement with the owner of the farm, thus setting up the stage for improving the airfield (lengthening the runway, building a taxiway, installing a runway irrigation system to eliminate dust, improving the hangar) and building the resort facilities right at the airfield. Considering the current and future work on the infrastructure, Bahia Gliding resort is making progress in leaps and bounds and it poised to be ready to receive its first official overseas visitors next season.
More about Flying in Bahia
After all this talk about gliders and infrastructure, you are probably eager to hear more about actual flying in Bahia. If you have read my article in Free Flight, you already have an idea about what was like in 2012, and it was awesome. But this year’s flying was even better!
For starters, this year I made nine cross country flights compared to five in 2012. During those nine flights I racked up 56:21 hours and 6273 cross country kilometers, for an average of 697 km/flight. All nine flights earned one of the top three spots on the OLC plus worldwide daily score.
The soaring weather conditions within the 300 km radius from LEM are usually fairly uniform and reliable. The usual modus operandi for flying long FAI triangles is to initially head West, downwind towards the border between Bahia and Tocantins provinces, located some 65 km West of LEM. The first turn point is usually between 5 and 50 km inside Tocantins, depending on the weather and the planned XC flight distance.
For the second leg of the triangle you either turn roughly due North or due South. On most days the sky looks equally good in both directions and you can easily go either way. When flying a 700 to 800 km FAI triangle, the second leg is usually around 250 km long usually with a moderate Easterly crosswind. The third leg, also around 250 km long, is to the Southeast if you took the Northerly route or to the Northeast if you chose the triangle to the South. The fourth and final leg of the triangle goes due West and can be anywhere from 80 to 150 km. The final glide into the setting sun is downwind, which can be helpful if you’re going for the maximum distance. Also helpful are the stubble fires which are a reliable source of very good and not too turbulent thermals even late in the day.
Days 1, 2 and 3 and my first outlanding in Bahia
During the first two days (9/15 and 9/16) the weather was a little less than ideal, with high humidity at the top of the convective layer causing the Cu’s to spread into a layer of stratocumuli in the afternoon. For this reason, and because I was a bit overly ambitious, I landed out about 90 km south of LEM after completing 672 km on the second day.
I chose a 1.6 kilometer long smooth dirt airstrip next to a large farm. No sooner I got out of the cockpit, a worker from the farm arrived on a motorcycle to check out what had happened and if I was okay. Thanks to my (and his) rudimentary knowledge of Spanish we managed to communicate enough for him to help me move the glider off the runway, after which he gave me a ride on the back of his motorbike to the farm’s main office. There I got introduced to Luis Evandro Gauer, the managing director for this and five other soy and cotton farms in Bahia, all owned by a company called FraNor and totaling some 40,000 hectares. After a phone call to Marcel to report the land-out and the coordinates, Luis took me to one of the farmhouses with a bathroom, a large kitchen, a dining room and a couple of sofas in front of a big screen TV and offered me to stay there while he attended to some of his duties. I crashed on the sofa, relaxing and surfing through Brazilian TV channels. Luis returned after about an hour and offered me a cold beer and a couple of tuna sandwiches, both of which I gladly accepted. After we finished the meal, and after I refused the second beer, Luis took me on an hour long guided tour of the farm showing me the twin cotton processing lines, huge soybean silos and a number of very large and very modern combines, tractors and various other farm equipment. Soon after we finished the tour, Gugui and Bruno arrived in the Bahia Gliding Jeep with the trailer. Twenty minutes later we were on our way back to LEM – a 130 km two hour trip. Gugui and Bruno brought a few sandwiches and a two liter Coke bottle that Gugui’s mother-in-law Araci filled with freshly squeezed orange juice. We made it back to the house around 11 PM, just in time for the third installment of the dinner.
At this point I should mention that landing out in Bahia is a fairly safe and straight forward affair. The area is flat with large cultivated fields and with a number of farms with adjacent dirt strips used by crop dusters. There are, however, some less hospitable areas. Most notably, the Tocantins province to the West of Bahia and the Goiás province to the Southwest feature hilly terrain at elevation of 400 to 500 meters QNH, covered in tropical shrubs and dwarf trees. The cultivated fields few in this area are few and far between and the road network is fairly sparse. However, if you stay within 20 to 30 kilometers from the Bahia border, you can always move back closer to Bahia and the landable terrain if you happen to be getting lower. Similar scenery is also typical in the Piauí and Maranhão provinces to the North of Bahia. On the flip side, there are a number of airports and airstrips whose coordinates I had in my Oudie and I would often check (and confirm) that I was within the gliding range of at least one of them.
The weather on Day 3 (9/17) improved, with only a few localized areas of cumulus over development. I flew a 599 km triangle to the North, because the XC Skies forecast was a little better to the North. At one point on the third leg, while climbing in a 3 m/s thermal under one towering cumulus, virga appeared from the opposite side of the cloud, producing a very bright and beautiful rainbow. During this flight the total energy system in the Jantar was n’t functioning properly, which made things interesting when pulling up from a 180 km/h cruise speed.
The rainbow.
Day 4, 5 and 6
The morning of Day 4 (9/18) brought overcast skies and even some rain early on. Gugui decided to call a non-flying day and troubleshoot the Jantar TE system instead. Given that I spent a lot of time in the cockpit the previous three days, right after the 30 hour trip from Vancouver, BC to LEM, Bahia, I was quite happy to have a rest day. After a few hours of troubleshooting the TE system we discovered that the culprit was the old PZL pneumatic vario, which appeared to have developed a leak. The problem was solved by swapping the PZL with a Winter vario from the back seat of the Grob 103 Twin II. By around 1 PM the skies cleared and the Cu’s started popping, so the day could have been a flying day after all.
Day 5 (9/19) the weather returned to normal, making for an easy 723 km to the North.
Day 6 (9/20) turned out to be weaker than expected (1.7 m/s average for the flight), but still good enough for a 589 km (568 FAI triangle) to the South.
Days 7 and 8
Day 7 (9/21) the weather conditions improved with cloud bases initially at 3000 meters, rising to 3500 m in the afternoon. I was also able to take advantage of cloud streets on several long glides. To top it all off, my last thermal was a stubble fire in which I gained 1415 meters of altitude in 2 minutes and 19 seconds, for the average of 10.2 m/s! The tally for the day was a 767 km flight (751 FAI triangle) at an average speed of 126 km/h. Not bad for a Jantar Standard 2 and the starting altitude of 200 meters QFE. Considering that I could have taken off at least half an hour earlier and that I could have landed half an hour later than I did, a 900 km flight should have been possible that day.
For Day 8 (9/22) the weather forecast looked great and I decided to go for the maximum distance. This time I chose to fly the Northern triangle, if for no other reason than to change the scenery. By midafternoon, the cloud bases rose to 4100 meters QNH, but the conditions were drier than the day before and with not as many cloud streets as I have grown accustomed to. Mid-way through the second leg I chose to deviate around a large area of brush fires in order to keep the wings clean for the remainder of the flight. The result was an 810 km flight (783 km FAI triangle) at still respectable 117 km/h, worth 1044 points on the OLC+.
Days 9, 10 and 11
For day 9 (9/23) the forecast again looked very good and the cloud base was supposed to be a few hundred meters higher than the day before. Marcel and I prepared Gugui’s Nimbus 3T-25.5 and this was going to be my first ever attempt at a 1000 km triangle. Exciting stuff! I made two flights with the Nimbus during my last year’s trip to Bahia, but those were in the 24.5 m “short” wing configuration. This time around the Nimbus was rigged with the long tips, bringing the span to 25.5 meters. With everything prepared and waiting on the runway, we got a call from Gugui that there was an overheating problem with the tow plane’s engine. By noon the problem wasn’t getting any closer to being solved, so we decided to call it off for the day and went to a local river beach instead. The water was just the right temperature and crystal clear and we enjoyed a couple of hours of swimming and had a few beers, all while keeping an eye on the Cu’s high up in the afternoon sky.
Day 10 (9/24) was forecast by XC-Skies to be even better than the day before, however the weather didn’t unfold as forecast. During the day a cold front approached LEM from the Southwest and a pre-frontal weather pattern with low visibility and significant overdevelopment affected a large are to the South and West of LEM. Soon after turning South for the second leg the sky got almost totally overcast and I realized that I wasn’t going to break any (personal) records that day. I still managed to cover 644 km and got in a lot of practice flying the long winged Nimbus, which compared to Jantar Standard 2 required a much different piloting technique, especially when banking in and out of turns.
The XC-Skies forecast for day 11 (2/25) was again very good, and it being my last flying day in Bahia for this year, I prepared for another attempt at a 1000 km triangle. Since the cold from the day before was stalled some 150 km Southwest of LEM I decided to try going North instead of South. I took off at 10:27, earlier than usual, but initially had trouble finding a good thermal and was back to 200 m QFE when I finally connected with a decent 2.3 m/s. The CU’s started popping early, but as I was approaching the Tocantins border the sky started looking darker and darker with poor visibility and very little sunshine on the ground. I decided to cut short the first leg a few km before reaching the edge of the Bahia plateau and turned Northeast to try to get away from the area affected by the front. However, after about 50 km I reached the edge of a huge blue hole covering the whole Northern half of Bahia. I climbed as high as I could (to 2700 m QNH) below one of the last Cu’s and set off into the blue hole. The air was felt smooth, which was not a good sign. Further ahead I did manage to find a blue thermal, but it was only 0.7 m/s. At that point I decided to finally give up the quest for 1000 km triangle and turned Southeast towards where the weather looked to be the best. It was a good decision and I soon connected with a couple of 100 km long cloud streets, first one going Southeast and the next one due South. The remainder of the flight was effortless and very enjoyable and I ended up covering 808 km. The flight duration was 7:18 and I probably could have stretched it another half hour, which means that a 1000 km triangle is definitely possible on a good day.
Total Tally
Overall, I flew 9 days for a total of 56:21 hours and 6273 km (697 km average per flight). What these impressive numbers don’t show is how great the whole experience was for me. The accommodation, food and hospitality was fantastic, the company was fun, the weather was hot (up to 40°C) but quite bearable due to very low humidity and the flying was safe, effortless and extremely enjoyable.
I can only look forward to September 2014.
Great skies and close to the Toncantins.
Bahia from the air.
View on the tie-down area and from the hangar.
Greetings from Holland on this first day of the year 2014,…make it a good and safe one!!!!!!!
Ritz
