Apparent wind is a cool thing; and it's what makes planing windsports so much fun.
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Mythbusters to take on: PLANE ON A TREADMILL!!
- Thread starter Tex_Hill
- Start date
Apparent wind is a cool thing; and it's what makes planing windsports so much fun.
The boat (or windsurfer) needs to sail directly downwind. So if the winds are out of the north at 10, the boat’s course is 180 and it’s speed is > 10. Or its course is due north and it’s speed is > 0.
Apparent wind indeed. "In the foiling AC72 America's cup catamarans, the boats sail through the water at up to double the environmental wind strength. The effect of this is to radically change the apparent wind direction when sailing "downwind". In these boats the forward speed is so great that the apparent wind is always forward—at an angle that varies between 2 and 4 degrees to the wing sail. This means that AC72's are effectively tacking downwind, although at a greater angle than the normal 45-degree upwind angle, usually between 50 and 70 degrees."
There are fancy ways that a glider could take advantage of the difference in wind between two airmasses, but that is rather hard to do reliably in full size gliders.
Yeah, I don’t that you could in a full size one. I’ve seen the radio controlled ones do dynamic soaring, though. Crazy.
It depends on the lunar cycle- basically it has to be at high tide.
Having sailed with Rob, I can vouch for this! And don’t let him fool you, he doesn’t F%$# things up!
Albatrosses do it. But calm air days = sled rides in sailplanes.
Even then the warmer air rises over the cooler air it's converging with like it's going over a ridge, so it's not really still. In NW Florida, If you could get high and stay high early enough in the spring on a rare early hot day just as the sea breeze started kicking in you could ride around in it, but as soon as you got below the rising air you were looking for a place to land- at least the maritime air was pushing you towards the land. The nice thing about the stretch from Mobile to Pcola was that you couldn't swing a stick without hitting a landable field.
The club in Hampton Roads will go out to the military aviation museum in Pungo and fly out of there if some of the weather geeks think the conditions will be right for it.
This past summer, I joined the glider club out in Front Royal, VA. It has a great mix of thermals, ridge, and wave.
Unfortunately, we are have issues with our wave window right now. The FAA wants 45 day notice to go into Class A and yeah, no one can predict wave that far out. So right now we are capped at 18,000 ft.
It's a great club 2 ASK-21s for training a sprite and a discus for fly fun flying. Plus many private gliders.
When the hell did that start?! The Blue Ridge club, and the place out at Chilhowie doesn't have that problem (that I know of...).
That's a HUGE bummer.
It seems to have been within the past year. It has been that way since I have been with the club. But has been a new thing the club has had to deal with.
We had a plan had a plan to do a week of training out in Petersburg, WV last month. There is reliable wave in the winter there up to FL230. But we had to cancel because there was a change in airport personnel and we missed the application for the deviation from the FARs.
There are a few of us who are exploring flying IFR in gliders. We aren't interested in flying IMC, just IFR. The FARs describe how one can get instrument current in a glider by flying a single engine airplane.
Interesting. How does one get a sailplane IFR rated? Instrumentation alone is going to be difficult. especially when a lot of FSDOs won't let you make changes to the airplane's electrical system (unless you're flying experimental...)