Freesteel Blog » Quick XC flight report

Quick XC flight report

Monday, June 5th, 2017 at 11:52 am Written by:

Some friendly competition in Derbyshire between hangies and paragliders on Saturday meant I got to witness the scale, organization and infrastructure of the paragliders — which included following me on xcrt.aero and being at the nearest road before I’d even had time to pick myself off the ground.

Then I was in the car for an hour as they drove madly up and down the M1 taking wrong turnings in an effort to collect three other paragliders strewn in the area.

Motto: write the logbook on the day and edit the video as quick as possible without wasting too much time.

My flight datalogger failed to record anything, so I can’t see if my thermal detector collected any signals.

Not that I had any spare brain capacity. For two hours I was continually trying to visualize and feel the structure of the air convection wafts while making constant adjustments to my circling.

I’m also learning how to stay in very weak air where you are gradually losing height — but at a slower rate than if you were on a desperate glide to nowhere — which moves you forward in time for something else to develop. It’s like skipping a turn in a card game.

Here’s a screen-grab of the livetrack24 view of my flight, which receives updates from an app running on your mobile phone.

livetrack

This is not to be confused with the latest AirWhere technology thing, also done by the paragliders recently which create an ad-hoc Lorawan network among themselves that displays their distance and climb rates of your neighbours on the network.

A small amount of additional calculation and they’ll be able to circle the ones who are in thermals you should fly to and join. This helps people haven’t learnt how to judge distances, times and glide angles.

I just cannot keep up with the tech.

Here’s some plots that I did salvage the data.

flightterrain

flightterrainside

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