Many years ago.... Joe and I had his cross country plane up to about 8500 ft. AGL. I don't recall the exact number (it was 8500 and change), but he had one of the first Casio altimeter watches, and we put it in his sailplane. We could track the total altitude climb and descent through the course of the flight. Joe climbed a total of 21,000 ft over the entire course. These numbers are off the top of my head... but are pretty close to my recollection. Total climb may have been over 23K... This was the Cal Valley course.
Prior to this experiment, we had thought we were maybe seeing 5 thousand feet AGL with a cross country sailplane. If you are directly overhead, you can get significantly higher and stay in visual contact. Cross country planes aren't necessarily designed for maximum performance, but the fuse and wing chords are much larger than optimum just so you can see the darn things. First time I ever flew cross country - Joe gave me one sentence worth of advice... "If at any time you're comfortable seeing the model, you're not high enough..." __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
