Some years ago at this time of year, I was flying a trike near Wyong on the seaward side of some sand dunes. In those days, anything above 300' AGL was illegal so we flew at 1'.
A few of us were flying around and when we landed, we got talking to some three axis pilots who were complaining of turbulence around the sand dunes. The trike flyers were all ex H-G pilots and looked at each other in amazement and mentioned to the 3 axis pilots the probability of the prevailing westerly, off-shore winds causing a rotor off the dunes. This appeared to be a Eureka moment for them because they'd not considered things like mechanical turbulence because low and slow was not where they flew. No doubt wind turbines can cause turbulence but it is highly likely that the ridge on which they were sited would cause far more turbulence. My narrow experience suggests that many fixed wing & helicopter aircraft pilots don't take this enough into account. >>Wind powered ships are basically just used for recreation. Hmmmm. That's a fairly narrow viewpoint. It may be true of a single century and it will probably be invalid in a few years when the other stuff runs out. D _______________________________________________ Aus-soaring mailing list [email protected] To check or change subscription details, visit: http://lists.internode.on.net/mailman/listinfo/aus-soaring
