RECORD RUN
by Darren Bedwell

Click on the picture for an enlargement!

On 13 July, 2002, I flew a 100 km triangle in the PW-5, in an apparently successful attempt to set some (not yet official) Indiana state soaring records.

I used Terry airport as my start and end points. The two turnpoints I chose were (1) the "Frankfort Racetrack", at the Clinton County fairgrounds, about 21 miles northwest of Terry airport, and (2) the Tipton County courthouse, about 20 miles northeast of Terry Airport. This triangular course is about 67 miles, or about 104 kilometers.

Since this was a Saturday, after everyone else who wanted to fly the PW-5 that day had had the opportunity, I got permission from the crew chief to take the PW-5 for more than an hour to attempt the flight. Peter DeTore agreed to serve as my official observer. I set up my turnpoint camera and we prepared and stowed the barograph. Before the flight, I wrote out a declaration and photographed it: I declared that my start point for the 'soaring performance' would be the same as the point of tow release; the two turnpoints, in order; and that a landing at Terry airport would end the flight and stop the timer for the speed record. Tony Johnson towed me to a point directly over the crew tent and about 3000 feet above the ground, where I released from tow. Peter started the timer, and I was off.

The first thing to do was to find a booming thermal and get plenty of altitude. Don Taylor was flying around in a Blanik, working a nice strong thermal just a mile or two northwest of the runway -- right along my intended courseline -- and was pretty high. Grateful for having a marker, I went straight to his thermal and climbed to about 6000 msl at maybe 300-400 feet per minute, while the wind pushed me ever so slightly closer to the first turnpoint. From 6000 feet, I could barely make out Frankfort in the distance, but I saw lots of cumulus up that way, and a big blue hole in between me and the lift. I set my speed ring at 4 and headed for the first turnpoint.

On the way there, I hit a weak bump or two. But nothing like a real thermal. All the cumulus seemed to be at least as far north as the turnpoint. There were some weak and dissolving cumulus just south of the turnpoint, and I shifted my course slightly east to reach them, while I mentally gauged the glide distance to Frankfort Airport. I tried one feeble cumulus after another, but none of the lift was better than about 100 fps. I was about 2000 feet above the ground and about 5 or 6 miles east of FKR at that point - an easy glide, but one I definitely did not want to make. And I still had not made my turnpoint, about a mile or two away, between me and the airport. I was tempted to run in and take my turnpoint photo right away, but I realized that there were no visible signs of lift that direction, the wind was blowing me toward it anyway, and I really needed to get a good thermal before I set off on the upwind leg towards Tipton.

The visible signs of good lift were all north of the main east-west road in Frankfort, so I finally did what I should have done right away - worked my way north and got underneath some healthy young cumulus clouds. Once I gained a few thousand feet back, I got impatient to be off to Tipton, so I ran back to the first turnpoint and snapped a couple of photos.

The first photo was probably right on the edge of the photo sector, but the second one was definitely good. Turning to look at the road to Tipton, I noticed that to the north, or left, of my course, there were quite a few good-looking cu's but to the south, or right, of my course there was a big, empty blue sky. I shifted my course to the north and set off for Tipton.

The lift was not too bad along the second leg -- at least compared to what I'd just spent a half an hour struggling in. I found a lot of zero sink and was able to porpoise without stopping to thermal quite a bit. I know that Helmut Reichman says porpoising in weak lift is not as fast as using speed-to-fly, but it is less work, and I was in no huge hurry. I had dialed the speed ring back to about 2 or 3 at this point, I think. Actually, as you can see from the graphic, I did stop to thermal under cumulus several times on this leg. Even though it was directly upwind, I made better time on the second leg than on the first because of all the time-wasting I did at the end of the first leg trying to get back up to altitude. didn't waste much time on the second leg.

As I approached Tipton, I was talking to Kurt Ristow and Brad Hays on the radio. Kurt was working a strong thermal near Tipton at that very moment. Brad was on final glide passing Sheridan and reported that there was basically no lift in the blue between Tipton and Sheridan worth stopping for. As I approached Tipton, a couple of miles to the west, I ran into a booming thermal. I was high enough for comfort already, and on an upwind leg, so I made a mental note of its location and pressed on for my turnpoint.

I flew right over the Tipton courthouse, pulled up and shot a couple of quick turnpoint photos, and turned straight back to the big thermal. By then, a nice haze dome was forming at the spot, and I worked it back up to about 5500 msl, which I calculated would barely give me a final glide back to Terry at 5 miles per thousand feet. I assumed that I would be able to gain a little by porpoising again on my way home. As it turned out, I was wrong - there was no lift worth slowing down for on the final leg. I had the bad judgment to try a few circles near the town of Sheridan, but on the whole I should have just trusted Brad's radio call!

But my 25 to 1 rule of thumb calculation was conservative, as it turned out - for one thing, I had a 7 to 10 knot tailwind. I just held my airspeed between about 45 and 50 knots and waited impatiently as first southern Tipton County, then northern Hamilton County, slid underneath my nose and Terry Airport got closer and bigger. I sped up as I got closer to the airport. Per Glider Ground's request, I landed long and as my main wheel touched the grass, Pete stopped the timer at 2 hours, 5 minutes and 55 seconds, for an average speed of 31.7 miles an hour.

As we put the sailplane away, Pete congratulated me on my record-setting flight. "There's a couple records for you to go and break," I told him.

How To Create Your Own "PovRay" Trace Image

The image was created by setting my Garmin 12XL to record a trackpoint every 15 seconds during the flight. I downloaded the track log to my computer from the GPS and converted it to an IGC file with "g7towin" software. Then I used WinIGC_to_POV.exe to convert the IGC file to a PovRay source file. The green mosaic background is based on low-res satellite images of the actual terrain involved (you can make out the town of Lebanon as a light-colored smudge just northwest of Boone County airport, for example). WinIGC_to_POV does all that more or less automatically (once you have the software configured, and all the right data files downloaded to your hard drive!) Then I manually edited the PovRay source file to add the airports (which I chose to represent with red spheres - although with a little more work I could have used little gray or green rectangular runways instead) and the various text labels. The turnpoint photo sectors are semi-transparent quadrants of cylinders.

http://www.povray.org/