Mitt liv som Tobin

I started working on my glider rating when I moved to Germany, what 2011 or so, hoping to finish in one summer season. Well here we are seven-ish years later.

Hoping to solo tomorrow and knock out the last three of the required ten solo flights before the checkride. Even more so, hoping to solo in the Schweizer 1-26, a single-seater.

Tempted to make a trip out to Marfa TX, where Burt Compton offers free glider checkrides in the winter months.

I haven't done so much flying lately - well, compared to the weeks where I was going to Byron for flight lessons every weekend day. I did make it to the legendary Air Sailing in Nevada for a three-day weekend, but, alas, due to wildfires in Northern California conditions were terrible. Smoke filled the valley, and set up a thermal inversion that just killed all the easy lift. Some of the better pilots in better aircraft were able to get up to 12,000 feet, but then even they complained about poor visibility and returned to base. Matt and I took three tows to 8,000 feet and just took a "sled ride" back down to the gliderport (6,000 feet MSL), failing to work any meaningful lift. Another weekend I made a daytrip to Truckee (three hours driving each way!) and had a great lesson with one of our club's best soaring pilots, Buzz G.

Back at Byron this Saturday, went up with Larry, first for a high tow (to around 3,000 feet above the quarry), then a pattern tow. On the high tow, I did my best-ever boxing-the-wake. We did stalls and incipient-spin-recovery and steep turns. In boxing-the-wake, you take the glider - still on tow behind the towplane - down through the turbulent prop wash, then make a rectangular "box", going right, up, left, down around the wake. Aggressive stalls still give me the willies - pulling the nose up over the horizon, then recovering pointing very much down towards the earth.

On my pattern tow, to simulate a rope-break, Larry pulled the tow-release at 300 feet AGL. This is just above the threshold (200 ft AGL) where making a U-turn to land back on the runway - in the backwards, downwind direction - is prescribed. I made the landing just fine, but should have turned one way instead of the other to more gracefully line up with the runway. In powered airplanes, this is called the "impossible turn" - if your engine fails in the takeoff climb, powered airplanes, with their poor glide ratios, generally can't turn around to land on the runway from which they came. In the glider, by contrast, you actually have to use the airbrakes (or slip) to get down after making the 180.

After this, Larry set me off on my own, first a solo high tow, then three patterns. Practice makes perfect - in most of my flying at Byron there's been a 20 kt wind, but yesterday was calm. It takes practice to get the approach just right in varying wind conditions.

Four glider solos in the logbook now - need a minimum of 10 for the rating.

For the first time I had a repeat Couchsurfer - Amanda, who couchsurfed at my place in Germany along with her boyfriend Brian, came up to the Bay Area this weekend for a big Quora meetup, movie-making, and other fun. Today I took her out to Byron to go up in a glider.

After Amanda's flight, I went up for two flights with the instructor (JDB). For the first time I did a satisfactory "boxing the wake" -- this is a maneuver done while being towed by the tow-plane, to demonstrate your control of the aircraft. First you descend down through the tow-plane's propeller wake (very noticeably turbulent!), and then take the glider in a square path around the wake - right, up, left, down, etc. You have to hold a lot of rudder to keep the glider flying straight even though it's off to the side of the tow-plane, and the tow-line is pulling the glider inwards. We also practiced slack line maneuvers - dealing with slack line that might develop in the tow rope.

Amanda continued on her roadtrip back to Los Angles, and I decided to give myself a little adventure and try hitchhiking back to Berkeley. I thought I'd probably get a ride into Byron, stop at the gas station for an ice cream sandwich, and then get a ride to a BART station. But, lo and behold, the first car to pass picked me up, and drove all the way back to Berkeley.

It was brutally hot out at Byron today: 96 degrees F forecast, 105 for tomorrow. Summer is here. Time to head to the mountains!

High-altitude airports are noteworthy because - with less oxygen to burn in the engine, less air to push with the propeller, and less air to push with the wings - the performance of small airplanes is greatly reduced compared to when they are operated near sea level. The upshot is that you need a longer runway to take-off and land, and/or can carry less payload.

I had a hunch that the little airport in Lee Vining could be the highest airport in California. Surprisingly, a little Googling didn't provide the answer immediately, so a little hacking was in order. The FAA provides a downloadable database of all of the nation's aviation facilities, and via Nelson's blog I found some Python code to parse it.

So, without further ado, the highest-altitude public airports in California are:

7135.0	MMH	MAMMOTH YOSEMITE
6802.0	O24	LEE VINING
6752.4	L35	BIG BEAR CITY
6472.0	O57	BRYANT FIELD
6269.0	TVL	LAKE TAHOE
5901.0	TRK	TRUCKEE-TAHOE
5871.7	M45	ALPINE COUNTY
5299.0	O39	RAVENDALE
5284.0	BLU	BLUE CANYON - NYACK
5116.0	1Q2	SPAULDING
4984.0	O79	SIERRAVILLE DEARWATER
4899.9	O02	NERVINO
4623.0	O59	CEDARVILLE
4602.0	A28	FORT BIDWELL
4534.0	O05	ROGERS FIELD

Indeed, Lee Vining makes the list at #2. Truckee and Bryant Field, two other airports I visited on my recent epic hot springs trip, also show up on the leader board, at #6 and #4.

There are 37 non-private airports in the United States that are higher than Mammoth, all in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah. The highest is Lake County, Colorado, at 9934 feet, and the most entertainingly named is Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. The only two non-private airports above 5,000 feet not in the western states are Custer County (in the Black Hills of South Dakota) and Bradshaw Army Airfield on the Big Island of Hawaii (arguably a "western state").

Well this looks awesome:



Some other links:
* Backcountry Pilot: High Sierra.
* Tips on Mountain Flying
* http://www.flyincalifornia.com/recreational_destinations.php
* Fly-in Destination: Columbia O22
* Fly-in Destination: Harris Ranch 3O8
* Fly-in Destination: Gravelly Valley 1Q5
* http://aotf.tv/
* Escaping a downdraft

1. Got to an acceptable stopping point on one of my lab projects today... Just in the nick of time, tomorrow is my last day! Here's a little video on Facebook.

2. The family's talking about celebrating Thanksgiving at uncle likeabikemike's old Victorian wood-stove-heated house in Loyalton CA, north of Lake Tahoe. I think it would be awesome to fly there. There's a nearby airport called Sierraville Dearwater O79 Airport -- it's so small, they don't even sell fuel (approach video). It's 152 nautical miles northeast of Palo Alto, which seems quite doable. I would have to take a mountain flying course first to learn how to cope with updrafts and downdrafts and turbulence over the mountains and all that. With cold weather in November, I would guess that density altitude wouldn't be a big factor, but the field elevation is approx 5000 feet.



3. Still don't have a confirmed pickup day for the shipping company who will ship my stuff (suitcases, artwork, bicycle) to California. Hopefully that will get arranged tomorrow... If all else fails I could probably schlepp it all as checked luggage.

4. I cleverly misplaced my German bank card... I think I left it in a tram ticket machine. Of course the replacement card takes 7-10 days to arrive. Presumably I can get by on €10 for the next week...

Current reading: Adventures of a Physicist by Luis Alvarez.

Already at the end of the first chapter there is an unexpected aviation connection:

For Christmas that year [1933] my grandfather gave me his customary fifty-dollar check. Since I had lost my chance to parachute from a Navy plane, I decided to spend the fifty dollars on flying lessons. I drove out to Midway Airport and found a willing instructor at fifteen dollars an hour, a fee that included the use of large, open-cockpit Curtiss Fledgling biplane, a direct descendant of the famous Curtiss Jenny of the First World War. I asked my instructor whether I would be able to solo on my fifty dollars. He said I should if I had any aptitude. I soloed with just three hours of dual instruction and made three solo landings before I used up my Christmas check. This early flying experience began my lifelong love affair with aviation. When I closed my log books at the age of seventy-three, they showed more than one thousand hours of flying time, most of it as pilot in command. I think of myself as having had two separate careers, one in science and one in aviation. I've found the two almost equally rewarding.

On my to-do list: Fly an airplane upside-down.

To this end, I just scheduled an aerobatic lesson at this place in Santa Paula CA for Wednesday afternoon--hopefully the weather will cooperate!

Weirdly, it seems that some people want to build a general aviation airport a few miles south of LIGO in Louisiana:

http://theadvocate.com/news/3623790-123/officials-hope-to-build-livingston

I wish it was there while I was there!

Building new general aviation airports is quite rare -- usually old general aviation airports are instead transformed into shopping malls. )-:

The first weekend at the glider field I got only 18 minutes in the air. Our second weekend, the sun came out and situation was completely different. My first flight of the day was 52 minutes, and we quit only to give the next pilot a turn.

I would say that flying in the glider is much more aggressive, much more dynamic than in the Cessna. The Cessna, by comparison, you just sort of put-put around the traffic pattern, point it in the direction you want to go. The glider is an entirely different experience.