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Blanik Record Highlights

This section will contain a description of the flight.  The flight log can be found here on the OLC site.

At about 9:20 AM CST On Thursday morning, 15 November 2007, my crew, Rand Baldwin, and I moved our sailplane, a Blanik L-23 belonging to the Huntsville Soaring Club, to the east end of the runway at Moontown and made our final preparations before takeoff.

Our tow pilot and Official Observer, Jerry Barnett, taxied the tow plane to the side of the runway and climbed out to supervise the installation of the flight recorder.

Under Jerry's supervision, I installed my Cambridge Model 20 flight recorder in the baggage compartment of the L-23 and connected it to a 12V battery and to my PDA. The PDA mount was affixed to the rear canopy, where I sat during flight. I ran Glide Navigator II on the PDA and declared the task electronically with the software, which transferred it to the FR.   (Back to Main Article)

Meanwhile, Rand got into the front cockpit and Jerry took our photo and at 9:30am CST we signed a written declaration that Rand had prepared the night before.

Jerry then climbed into the Pawnee and we took off at ~9:37 AM.

Just after 10:20 AM, we arrived over Marion Co. Airport at ~5000', where we released and immediately began a series of right-hand turns, to mark our release point and to provide enough time for the software to compute the wind direction and strength from the rate at which the glider drifted downwind. We then began to descend and make our way to the start point, where we started at ~10:27 AM and ~3700' MSL. The sky was broken to overcast with a ceiling at ~4500'AGL and became completely overcast later.

We glided ~six miles NE to the south end of the Sequatchie Valley ridge and began what turned out to be an easy run north to our first turnpoint at the Hinch Mountain VORTAC. The wind was almost perpendicular to the ridge at 20-25 knots.  

We turned in the sector at Hinch, then headed back the way we had come, this time with a quartering tailwind. By the time we reached our second turn at Signal Mountain, we had averaged ~75 mph. We then retraced our route back north, passing our first turn and proceeding to Brady Mountain, which is a lower extension of the Sequatchie ridge north of the head of the Valley. We nervously tiptoed into the last turn sector, which is approximately a mile north of Brady, then hurried back to the ridge, where the welcome surge of ridge lift lofted us back to ridge top.

From there, it was another cakewalk south to a point north of Signal Mountain. There we had to stop and work a thermal to ~4,000' AGL, which was enough to cross a ~14-mile unlandable area and arrive at a safe height above the Lookout Mountain ridge a few miles south of Chattanooga. The ~20 knot tailwind was a big help! We called Jerry on the radio and asked him to fly the Pawnee to Gadsden and meet us there when we landed.

We arrived well above Lookout and stayed high in a mixture of high ridge and extended thermal lift under some Cu's. We wanted to stay high to facilitate a ~5-mile transition at Johnson's Crook to a ~60-mile section of the Lookout ridge that runs from there to Gadsden, AL. After an uneventful transition, we slowed to ~60 mph and remained ~500-1000' above the ridge all the way to its south end.

When we reached the end of the ridge, we were ~900' above and ~ five miles from Gadsden Airport.

Since there is no place to land between the ridge and the airport, we held our breath and started a max glide to runway 18. The ~15-20 knot tailwind was a godsend and helped us make it to the runway with ~200' to spare. We didn't have enough altitude to fly down the runway and turn to land upwind, so we had to land straight ahead and downwind, but it worked out and Jerry met us as we rolled to a stop.

We spent a few minutes celebrating, then we pushed the glider to the departure end of runway 36 and hooked up for the aerotow back to Moontown.

We released a few miles south of Moontown and followed Jerry in to land at ~4:35 PM. We tied down the glider, extracted the FR and PDA under Jerry's supervision, and downloaded the flight file into my laptop. We burned the flight log to two CDs and gave them to Jerry.

Back to Main Article, or

     The Task and the Stats, or
     [Preparation for the flight], or
     The weather for the day.