First Glider Flight Away From The Nest

July 27, 2024

Tyson Sawyer

The forecasts for Friday, Saturday and Sunday kept changing. I was looking for an opportunity to complete my FAI Silver Badge for soaring with a 50 km flight. The requirement is to get anywhere that is at least 50 km away from both the point of takeoff and the point of release from the tow plane. There are also some altitude restrictions that allow only a small loss of altitude over that distance.

While Friday may have been good, nobody else thought so and there was no opportunity to get towed. As of Saturday morning, Sunday didn’t look promising. Saturday I was committed as the afternoon tow pilot. I would need to return in time to be in the tow plane by 2pm and this would require being near the head of the line to get launched in the morning.

The Saturday forecast suggested that the thermals might start working around 10:45. The tools for planning such trips suggested that the flight could be done in well under 2 hrs. Given my limited experience, my own estimate was that I might do it in 2 1/2 hrs. If I could get launched before 11:00, it might be possible to be back before 1:30. I really should be trying to be back by 1:00 so that I would have time to eat, drink and get ready to fly the tow plane. This seemed a bit tight but worth trying.

As I needed to be near the front of the line of gliders for getting towed, I aimed to arrive at the airport by 8:30. I had previously seen the line forming shortly after 9am on good days. When we pulled in at 8:40, there were already multiple gliders being pushed to the staging line. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person thinking that an early start suited their plans for the day.

When I reached the staging line with the glider, I was 5th. I managed to tell a sad story about needing to get back early and negotiate the 3rd spot in line. Truth be told, some of those negotiations were after the fact. Thank you to the pilots that allowed me to move ahead of them.

After the hurry up part, we then accomplished the wait part while everything else got organized and setup for the day. Some aspects were delayed by a training glider getting put at the front of the line because they don’t need to wait for lift to do training and they need to launch many times during the day. There was also an on-boarding session for some new members and students the kept key people busy. It was found that the battery which hadn’t been fully installed in the trainer was the wrong one.

During this wait I discussed my ambitious plans for the day with a friend. He suggested that for the typical 120 km round trip distance (allowing some margin to ensure to not come up short), most low experience pilots who do well average about 35-40 km/hr (~20 kts) and it takes about 3 to 3 1/2 hours.

Well… that didn’t sound good for my already tight plan. I had done one local “task” where I averaged about 45 km/hr. That was closer, but still suggested that I would need to turn back before reaching my goal. We were all also noticing the smoke haze that would reduce the intensity of the sun’s rays and reduce the ground heating needed to create thermals.

I released from the tow plane at 3,000 ft above the ground or almost 3,500 ft above mean sea level (MSL). I soon found my first thermals that took me to 4,400 ft MSL, 4,800 ft MSL and 4,700 ft MSL. There is some altitude loss between thermals. This seemed like a reasonable start to the trip. It was now 11:30 and I needed to make some distance as I was only a few miles from the start point.

One of the first things I noticed was that the smoke and haze severely limited visibility. On a typical day, it would have been very easy to pick out Monadnock as soon as a couple thousand feed of been attained during tow and this would have allowed me complete situational awareness just by keeping and eye on it. Not today. I couldn’t see much past Fitchburg.

Then things started going down hill. My next attempt at a climb resulted in losing 100 ft of altitude. The following one was better with 200 ft of gain, but I was now down to 4,000 ft. 4,000 ft was fine, but the trend needed to change. Instead I found myself in some strong sink and my next attempt at a climb lost another 30 ft. It was starting to look like my trip would end early and not back at Sterling. I headed in a direction that was toward a large industrial building and parking lot. This was a likely place to find warm air rising. It was also in the direction of the closest airport in Gardner, MA. Before reaching where I would expect to find lift off the building I found what I needed, just when I needed it. Lift! This climb took me back up to 5,500 ft.

To this point I had spent 43 minutes to travel 8.5 nautical miles and nearly ended the trip due to getting low. 12 kts made good so far. Not close to fast enough.

With the newly earned altitude I turned to get in line with what looked like a possible cloud street that I might follow towards Monadnock. About 1/2 hour after my low point I was 3.5 miles SE of the Jaffrey airport where I found my highest climb to 6,000 ft. I was 1:40 into the trip, had about 40 minutes to return on my intended schedule and yet there was still another 10 miles to get to the goal.

With the altitude that I had, getting to Monadnock would be easy. The bad angel on my other should said, “Go for it!”. 10 minutes later I had reached the summit. I had covered an additional 21 nautical miles in 40 minutes since recovering from being low for an average speed of 32 kts. I had 25 minutes to return.

I had passed through sink getting to the summit but found a good climb on the upwind side of the mountain and a second one just on the downwind side. The computers were telling me that I had plenty of altitude to simply glide back downwind to Sterling. I wasn’t ready to trust it. I did one more climb over Rindge, NH and then glided straight from there, adjusting my speed to quickly get through the sink and slow down and spend more time in lift. The time from reaching Monadnock until returning to Sterling was 33 minutes. The final 22 nautical miles after the last climb passed by in 17 minutes at an average speed of 80 kts.

I landed at 1:09 pm, 2 hrs and 1 minute after takeoff.

I found two things when I landed. While on the trip, I thought I had heard that one of the other pilots who had gone south from Sterling had landed at another airport and needed a tow plane to go get him. Since it would soon be my time to be tow pilot, I took that task. The other thing I found was Emilie had seen how far out I was and hadn’t expected that I’d be back for quite a while. The glider had returned, but she wasn’t yet ready to fly.

About 35 minutes after landing I had eaten lunch and was in the tow plane to retrieve the glider that had landed out.

Emilie had planned to fly a local task of 27 miles (44 km) that doesn’t get very far from Sterling. She ran around that so fast that she recorded the fastest lap for that course this year, including a handicap was applied for the performance of our glider.

She then did another lap that took her to the Fitchburg airport, the Gardner airport and back. She ended feeling that it was time to land but had extra altitude and this created a case of the zoomies as she had fun maneuvering the glider at high speed and doing steep turns. She covered 70 miles and could have achieved the same distance goal if she had planned to do so. Next time the conditions and schedule works out, she will be ready.