Since the soaring season has nearly come to a close for much of the country, I present some soaring videos, stories, and sites worth spending some time with while you're stuck on the ground.
Kempton's Adventures
Kempton Izuno, a long time pilot flying in California and the Great Basin, has been documenting his adventures for some time now. They're great reading for aspiring XC pilots:
- 1995 Tonopah Adventures: early adventures flying out of Tonopah, Nevada including a great landout and retrieve story
- 1000k Days at Tonopah (1998): Kempton and friendswent back to Tonopah in 1998 in his standard Libelle, aiming for at least one 1000km flight.
- My First Big Cross Country Flight: from 1977, flying out of Truckee in a 1-26.
- Sierra Distance Flying (1992, part 1): the story of how Kempton won the Hilton Cup in his Standard Libelle flying Truckee and Minden
- A Standard Libelle Wins the Hilton Cup (1993): this is part 2 of the previous story, a great narrative of his winning flight
Mountain Wave Education
I was recently pointed at an excellent web site for learning about Mountain Waves and Downslope Winds that's part of a larger Mesoscale Meteorology Primer.
I've on looked at this briefly, but it definitely seems worth reading.
Morning Glory
A cloud known as 'Morning Glory' forms in the remote Australian outback of northern Queensland which offers some of the most dramatic and exciting gliding conditions in the world. You can read about it thanks to the cloud appreciation society or watch a video thanks to Google Video.
Bruce's Phoebus and ASW-20 Videos
While doing some searches on Yahoo! Video for soaring clips, I came across one of Bruce's videos. He owns a Phoebus and an ASW-20. He's taken some video flying in Utah.
Good stuff.
Posted by jzawodn at October 19, 2006 09:26 AM
A very interesting site, I think. The Idea of Technometry was new for me but worth to be read and thought abot it (although I'm not a native english-speaker and have some difficulties whith this language)
