Mike, Your point about the clouds growing faster than one can fly away was demonstrated aptly the other day in the West. Though this happened in a powered aircraft, it could just as easily been someone coming home from a xcountry. Throughout my time in gliding, I've always had a healthy respect for CB's and the like, nevertheless, about a month ago, I must admit that I was surprised to have had a CB build above my aircraft without any external prior indications. Puttering along, (as one does in an Auster) and though there had been a lot of scattered thunderstorms around earlier, the return track from Ravensthorpe to Cunderdin semmed pretty clear apart from a few isolated Cu's at about 15000ft. And so it was until about 20 nmiles from Cun in what was largely bright sunshine, a few large splats of rain appeared on the windscreen. No sooner had this happened than the VSI went to 4000ft/min up despite a fairly quick power reduction. A minute or so later, I was enveloped in heavy rain still going up at 4000 ft/min, engine near idle and airspeed on rough air max. Fortunately, I had enough speed to fly out of it whereupon I was greeted with the VSI pegged at the bottom now with power coming back to cruise+. Along with that, there were now great sheets of dust being raised by squalls impacting the ground making the scene scary indeed. Once clear, and turning 90deg to see what it was all about, I was astonished to see a full blown thunderst! orm behind, that anybody with sense would have avoided by 30 miles or more. Yet it built up in the matter of minutes and would certainly have been impossible to outrun in anything other than a conventional aircraft.
So much to learn...so little time! (Peter Sellers) On Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:08:45 +0900, Mike Cleaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > However in a craft that > cannot so easily escape the cloud-suck there is discussion in hang > gliding and paragliding circles as to how close to such a cloud you > can safely go. Simple answer is that sometimes these clouds grow > faster than you can fly away - so keep an eye on their development > and land if they start to develop. Problem is that if you are > underneath them at that time you can't see what is going on. ________________________________________________________ Zoltan Beldi Helena Valley WA 6056 ________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
