neonleonb

I didn't take any pictures at Slide this weekend, but I had a 50-minute thermalling flight. It's become clear that I have two main problems: I tend to fly too fast (I think my glider is still trimmed fast, though it's as slow as it'll go), and I have trouble getting started in a thermal. Once I'm circling in one, I can usually manage not to fall out of it, but figuring out whether that bump I just went through was a thermal or not is hard, and I can't usually afford too many circles to try to get it right.

But all said, I think I'll consider it a success.

By the way, when I went flying this weekend, I drove my car up this road.



I did this at 1am, when we arrived on Friday night. There were a few times when the car scraped the ground more than I'd have liked, but otherwise I'm damn proud, both of myself and my car.

I've spent the last two weekends on flying trips. First, I went to Hat Creek for the BHGC's annual 4th of July celebration. There was a great quantity of tasty pit-barbecued goat, and I got another launch video. Some of the pictures were also quite good. I also got 4.5 hours of airtime, which just goes to show how pleasant the site is. If you've heard of "glass-off," that's a regular phenomenon at Hat Creek, so there's lots and lots of easy lift.



This weekend, I went to Hull Mountain, and because it was too windy for me to fly on Sunday, I got some decent pictures there, too.

Flying at Dunlap this weekend was good. Saturday had very good weather, and on Sunday I borrowed Jonathan's variometer and stayed up for 1:15. I even got to 800 feet above launch height. I felt like a lord of the air. I could look past the launch ridge and see dry brown hills giving way to the snow-covered Sierras. It was my longest flight ever, and I was so very happy about it. My landing wasn't great (I didn't flare in time, so I scraped my shin a little), but everything else was wonderful.

On Sunday morning, we were woken up by the LZ owner's dogs. Johanna got some good pictures of me in various stages of alertness.

My family was kind enough to spend a whole day letting me fly at Lookout Mountain in northern Georgia, near Chattanooga. I'll tell the story with pictures.

For starters, they have a giant concrete ramp--much fancier than the (still sturdy and impressive) wooden ramp at Dunlap.


The ramp has a pretty nice view, even if the mountains are small and green.
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Unfortunately, I didn't fly terribly well, and I sank out quickly. Since the hill is so short, only 1300 feet, I didn't spend much time at all in the air. But it was still a worthwhile experience, and hopefully I'll soon learn to soar properly.

Even though it was fun, Lookout Mountain's rental service was substantially disappointing. First, they didn't have any intermediate gliders, though they had said they did on the phone. Next, they tried to rent me a harness without a parachute. Finally, they left me stranded at the bottom of the hill after my second flight, and, when I called their office asking about my options for getting my equipment back up to their office, they didn't help me get back up--they just told me about the penalties for not returning my glider by 6pm if I didn't manage to make it up in time. In the end, everything was fine, but I have to say I wasn't impressed.

But, the best part was that my family finally got to see me fly. I wish I could have done a better job of it, but it'll put all my other flying news in context for them. They even got video, but I'm not sure if I'll go to the bother of posting it or not. I guess I should, but it takes a while to upload several minutes of video over DSL.

The frequency of my updates has been dropping lately, so here's what I'm up to:

I've been dancing a lot. Now that the SwingCal class is over, I've been going to the 9:20 Special, a swing dance on Thursday night in San Francisco. I've also been going to Lindy on Sproul as usual on Saturday, and I've made it to a few blues classes and dances; I hope to be a regular at Friday Night Blues.

However, dancing takes a back seat to higher priorities. The next higher priority is hang gliding. I've only made 2 trips this spring, and the weather wasn't quite amazing on either of them. Still, I've been getting as many flights as I can, and soon I hope to soar like a pro.

Of course, the highest priority, putting a hold to both those hobbies, will be my trip to Johnson City to visit my family for two weeks. I leave on Wednesday. If I'm lucky, I'll actually get to do some flying in Tennessee, at Lookout Mountain, but with possible changes pending in my mom's treatment, it might not be possible. My brother has synchronized his visit, so it'll be a bit of a reunion, though as always, my pesky little sister isn't a team player :-P

All this is complicating my move. Because I had trouble finding a new roommate, I'm moving into a 100-square-foot bedroom in a 2-bedroom apartment with someone else who plans to graduate in December. It'll save me some rent, but moving is always such a pain. I'll be spending the weekend cleaning and packing, so when I come back from my trip, I'll be ready to move immediately, I hope. So far, that mostly consists of taking the things I have and giving them away to Goodwill and neighbors, or selling books for pennies to Half Price Books.

I guess I'm busy. Fortunately, I've still been making progress on code I need for my thesis. That's something, anyway.

This weekend. Now.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure I'm 100% motivated.

Saturday: spent dancing, eating amaretto/chocolate bon-bons and reading Vernor Vinge.

Sunday: I went to fly a few practice flights on the training hills at Ed Levin. But I lucked upon one of the liftiest days the East Bay has seen this spring. There were maybe 20 other pilots there, and some people stayed aloft for nearly 2 hours. I again flew in the wrong spots, so I came down after about half an hour; but the other people who came over to the same region as me did the same thing, so it's not that I was a terrible pilot. So, my second soaring flight ever! Go me.

In summary: I live the good life.

Today, my chrysalis hatched, and I went from being just some geek to being a true übernerd. That's right--today, I passed the test to be an Amateur Radio Technician! This gives me the authority to transmit radio waves on certain parts of the spectrum, at least once the government adds me to its database. I'll even have my own call sign! (US call signs start with the letters A, K, N, or W, which was something I had to memorize for the test. I found the following mnemonic handy: "WANK".)

In general, this has no use, except that it lets me communicate with people when I'm somewhere that's not good for cell phones. Hang gliding is one of those cases, so this summer I'll be able to legally communicate with fellow pilots and chase drivers. Hooray!

I got to go on a flying trip this weekend for the firs time in ages. We were at a site I'd never been to before: Dunlap. It has a wooden ramp for a launch, which was new to me. On foot, the ramp looked like the edge of the world and was sloped enough that it felt like it'd suck me away. In a glider, though, I felt much more comfortable on the ramp, since I wanted the world to fall away.

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I know the lead artistic designer for Bioshock 2 because he's joined the hang gliding club. That's pretty damn awesome.

I can fly!

If you read my journal, you're probably aware that I have been learning to hang glide for the past year. It has taken a lot of my time. This weekend, I went to fly at Hull Mountain, as I have several times before. But this time, I launched later than ever before (around 2pm), and when I hit lift, I turned in it and succeeded at climbing. I gained at least 1000 feet, and I managed to soar around for an hour.

What I can say about thermalling is this: I turned a lot faster than I was used to. The world spun around me, and I went up. It was fairly tricky to stay in the thermal, but whenever I'd lose it, I'd turn harder to get back to it and then try to gently turn around inside of it. It's a somewhat tricky thing, but it's rewarding, and I can see how pilots get addicted to finding lift and riding it up.

Oh--and I think Peter Pan had it backward. Happy thoughts are the *result* of flying, not its cause.

This summer, I've been going on hang gliding club trips, and I've gotten to fly at two mountains: Hull (landing to the north of Lake Pillsbury) and Slide (landing just east of where 429 and 395 meet). However, as a beginner, the club has kept me flying only in the mornings, when there's less turbulence (and also less lift), so I only get "sled rides," strictly downhill flights.

Well, this weekend I graduated somewhat. I launched at Hull in the afternoon! I hit some big lift, but I didn't do well with it, so my flight was only about 5 minutes longer than normal. Still, it was exciting, and it means that on future weekends I'll have lots more chances to soar. (It also means I'll get more flights: when I launch in the morning, I often miss Saturday morning because we're still on the road.) I'm flying with the big boys now.

Here's the video of my launch on Sunday afternoon:
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I understand some people (perhaps those that don't use VLC as their video player) were having issues viewing my launch video. Here it is, in YouTube format:



In general, it's a good, strong launch. I run hard and keep the nose down. (Any time you're near the ground, you want to keep your speed up. High stalls are fine, but low stalls are trouble.) I'm a little perturbed by the instant when my hand leaves the control frame during my launch run, but I'll try to be alert for such things in the future.

This weekend, I launched my hang-glider from the 1700-foot hill for the first time. It certainly got my pulse racing, mostly out of fear, but the flight was so long that I calmed down. After a minute or two it felt like I knew what I was doing. I always find myself surprised by the degree to which I need to correct the glider, though--there is enough turbulence to turn you around if you don't stay in control.

In any case, that means I'm nearly ready to fly at another site. I just need to practice stalling first. Of course, my first flights at another flight will be just simple rides down, in the morning before the air gets too turbulent.

In any case, I'm pleased. It's real progress.

Yesterday, I took my first flight from the 600' hill! It doesn't look that big here:



But here I look smaller:



And here I'm barely a speck in the background:



I had about 2 minutes of flight time, but it felt really fast.

My fears feel very similar when either launching a hang glider from a new height or trying to talk to a girl woman I'm interested in. No, I haven't asked anyone out, but I have the intention to do so when the time is appropriate. The question is, will I be able to run off of that hill when the wind is right?

W00t, metaphor.

No, really, the feeling is much the same in both cases. I feel a lightness in my stomach, and a need to simply back away. It feels like it's not too late to turn around and go home, and maybe waiting for a few minutes wouldn't be so bad after all, and then the wind changes, the woman walks away, and it turns out that it's too late to succeed after all.

I've gotten a lot of hang gliding pictures lately. There are a few very good pictures of me, and I'm glad. You can see more on Flickr.

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Yesterday, at the hang-gliding site, there were two horses hanging out on the hills. One of them was quite friendly, and so I got to pet a horse for the first time in a while. I was a bit nervous--they're damn big things--but the horse was probably as tame as you could find. They didn't even seem to think anything of a person carrying a glider with a 20+-foot wingspan. I guess they see that fairly often.

I also got to fly from the 300' hill for the first time. I was worn out after I'd carried the glider up 6 times, though. I guess it's good I didn't try for more flights, though, because I only barely got home in time to go meet Leslie Klasterka, my mom's friend's daughter, in San Francisco.

Here's a video of Billy's last flight from the 300. Ignore the instructors yelling in the background. Caution: it's about 9MB. His flight looks a lot like mine would, I guess, though I have a different harness than he does.

http://barrettnexus.com/Movies/2007-11-25/P1000265.avi

This morning it was windy at Ed Levin park, so we waited to set up the gliders. It got better, so I started to set up mine, and Lise followed suit. Then the wind got terribly strong--around 30 miles an hour or more. The gliders couldn't even be taken down alone--we had to have one person keep them from blowing away as they were taken apart. It was terrible, except that it was fun to feel that much wind. Here in CA, we don't get much wind, and this was nice. We drove up to the 1700-foot launch site so Barry could show us what it looks like, and the wind there was strong enough that we had to lean into it. It was almost as strong as my fond memories of Madison, WI, where the wind was enough to steal the breath out of your mouth.

In other news, you can see a long way from the 1700-foot launch.