Walking (not running) the Ridge

Ridge running is one of the joys of glider flying. Air moving perpendicular to a ridge line has to go somewhere, and the only place to go is up. When the ridge is working you can fly for hours. And that means fly. Flying something like a King Air is to ridge running what riding a glass elevator is to rock climbing.

But there's more to life than flying. Really.

That's why the kids and I went hiking on Monday (Memorial Day holiday in the USA). We have it good: to go hiking we put the dog on a leash, walk out the front door, and turn left.

It's a steep hill, and the sun was hot, and there was no wind. I was more concerned about water than anything else; no point in getting dehydrated.

We climbed until the slope leveled. The trail was a fire break along the ridge line, cut about 20 years ago during a devastating fire on the other side of the ravine. The trees have not grown back. It's wide enough to land on, and the slope is shallow enough, too, if it weren't for the knee high boulders.

We climbed about 1000 feet to the National Forest boundary, a logical place to stop. We admired the view and started down. I had a lot on my mind, a lot of good stuff: watching the kids, watching the dog, watching my step, the good feeling of exercise, and admiring the view. But there's always one corner of my mind that stays in the air. The breeze was light, first from the left, then the right, then ahead, then from the left. "Not a good day for ridge soaring," I thought.


But things changed in a hurry. Without warning, the wind was at our backs, tumbling down the slope at 25 knots or so. My son turned to say something, but I couldn't hear him. I held onto my hat. I thought about cutting toward the trees.

I looked back up the slope. The little finger of cumulus that had been hanging above us in the first picture, just a few minutes before, had blossomed into the massive CB in the second. Ouch!

It ended as quickly as it began.

I'll remember this storm the next time I'm ridge running. It's true that walking the ridge can make you better at running it.

Young Eagles Day

I am a long-time enthusiastic supporter of The Experimental Aircraft Association [EAA]. Their Young Eagles program gives kids an opportunity to fly.  For one reason or another I have never been able to participate until today.

I took the club Archer, accompanied by one of our chapter members, to Gooding, Idaho, the home of the Idaho School for the Deaf and Blind.  This is the third year that our chapter has given flights to the kids at the school.  As the name implies, most of the kids have some kind of developmental difficulty, but I still believe that everyone loves to fly. 

The airport was like a mini-Oshkosh, with planes continually taxiing out, launching, and returning.  We used Oshkosh call signs too, to keep the radio chatter under control.  I was the white Archer, Mike was the Red Cherokee, Austin was the Pulsar, and so on.  We kept the pattern pretty full, and it didn't take long to give something like 50 kids airplane rides.  (The rides were substantial; mine averaged 18 minutes.)

[By the way, everyone did a full 360 before taking the runway at this uncontrolled field. There have been way too many midair collisions in the pattern this year, with tragic consequences.]

When I taught computer science, I used to say that "a good computer scientist is interested in everything;" now I am beginning to think that "a good pilot is interested in everything," too.  For example, at some point I learned sign language letters.  My friends and I used this on multiple car road trips before there were cell phones.  "Next exit," we'd sign, and the like.  Today I flew two girls who were completely deaf, so the only way to communicate with them was by signing.  I felt inept: their signing is so graceful and fluid.  But mine worked.  The girl in front was fussing with her shoulder harness during the taxi out, and not wanting to get distracted during a "critical phase of flight," I stumbled through signing "W A I T."  Which she did.

So you may never fly with a passenger who cannot hear.  But think about this: two guys I knew were flying a King Air that lost a door in flight.  They kept it flying, and landed at an airport in one piece.  In their later talk about the incident, they said that one of their big problems was that it was too noisy to hear each other.  

A little bit of sign language would have helped.