Towlines
The Newsletter of the
www.abqsoaring.org
From the President By
Bob Hudson
What a month!!!
First, our guys and gals contributing to the OLC are really clawing out
great mileage. This last weekend we saw
seven flights over five hundred kilometers alone. Additionally, Geoff Aiken and Jimmy Weir went
out and almost busted a State Speed record in the Grob (details below). This is
“club” flying at its best.
If you had wandered out to the airport this past week
you would have noticed that we have been invaded by your United States Air
Force Academy. The AFA brought six
gliders and three tow planes down to “hone” their skills in cross country
flying. The first week was all Academy officers and instructors. Starting the 22nd, Cadets took
over and are working on their cross country skills. We could not have pulled this off if it
weren’t for the help of Billy Hill, Mark Mocho and Howard Banks. Also, Sundance was a key player in helping
On May 20th, one of the Ops folks didn’t show and we
had a wiz bang of a flying day. We had
airplanes everywhere and typical, everyone wanted to launch at once. We had a large contingent of club ships,
Sundance customers and the Air Force Academy.
Connie Buenafe, who was out to fly her airplane, immediately recognized
the need and jumped into to help Don Kawal with Ops. If it wasn’t for Connie,
we would not have had a safe and efficient launch. The club owes Connie a big pat on the back.
On another note, someone spilled a bucket full of
engine oil under the Pawnee in the main hangar and then just left it. Others walked through the oil and spread it
to he floor in the club house and then just left the mess for others to
cleanup. Additionally, someone unplugged
the refrigerator in the hangar which ruined all the contents in the
freezer. It seems we have a cadre of
individuals who don’t seem to think in terms of community. Remember it is everyone’s club and we need to
pull together as a club to make the system work. We can “up” the dues and have professionals
maintain the club but then that cuts into our flying activities. So please be good citizens and do your share
to keep the clubhouse a place to meet and enjoy the “brotherhood” of aviation.
On May 20th, Chip Garner gave a lecture on how to
compete. It was attended by about twenty
club members and about fifteen Air Force Academy Officers. I can’t speak for everyone but I learned a
lot and I appreciate Chip’s sharing his knowledge and experiences. I hope to have more “lectures’ for us. I am
currently trying to talk Brian Resor into lecturing us on Badge and Record
flying.
To add to Al’s legacy…we were honored to have two
Germans (from
The OLC, the
League and State Records
In the OLC
Classic (the total number of distance points scored) we have gone from
being miles behind (sic) Ridge Soaring Irregulars and Aero Club Albatross to
being neck and neck for first place in the
The full listing of our flights is on the OLC web
site, but worth noting are the great efforts by Carl Ekdahl, Billy Hill, Brian
Resor, Art Hale, Chip Garner, Jim Cumiford, Mark Mocho, Kathleen Taylor, Angel
Pala, Clay Phillips, Jim Wier, David Harmony, Howard Banks. There were also great flights by our Sundance
colleagues, Tim Feager, Joe Shepherd, Bob Leonard, Al Whitesell and Mike
Abernathy.
In the new OLC
League, which measures the speed flown over the fastest two and a half
hours of any OLC logged flight, ASC is No 1 in the world for the first three
weekends of the contest – and probably also for the fourth weekend.
The fastest three each weekend are used to score. They are: Billy Hill, Jim Cumiford, Kathy
Taylor, Brian Resor, Danny Sorenson and from Sundance, Tim Feager, Joe Shepherd
and Al Whitesell. For the fourth weekend
(May 21st) the speeds and distances were extraordinary. Tim Feager scored 102 mph, Jim Cumiford just
over 100 mph and Joe Shepherd 97 mph.
In a State
record attempt, on that Sunday, Geoff Aiken
and Jim Wier took the club Grob 103 and tried for a 100 km speed record. They flew Moriarty-Zorro-Clines Corner and
back at over 70 mph but missed the Zorro turnpoint by half a mile. So no record.
But their effort is a wake-up call that there are State records waiting
to be beaten.
In fact, Kathy Taylor just had a feminine, 15 meter,
and sports class State record approved and Billy Hill and Howard Banks have State
records that are in progress, pending GPS calibrations.
Lessons from
a retrieve
The club had a land out in mid April where the
retrieve turned into an ugly mess. Both
the pilot concerned and the retrieve crew have learned a lot – especially about
the inadequacy of their approach and the equipment needed.
Here are their stories, first the pilot, Howard Banks,
and then the leader of the retrieve, Bob Hudson.
A narrow
escape: For the most part, the land out was
uneventful. I foolishly had pressed on
from a cloud with only modest lift to the next cloud where there was no lift –
or at least, no lift that I could find.
There was better looking ground to the west, and some scrappy clouds
that way, so I headed off, hoping for a save.
No such luck.
And the better looking field turned out to be full of cows and do I mean
full. I struggled with very weak lift
and drifted further west to a likely looking field and landed into wind. The field was rough (lots of vibration), but
it was more or less level, no tall vegetation, no rocks, no old car parts. In fact an ideal field. There were even buildings at the end.
I was lucky that there were still ASC pilots in the
air and Mark Mocho performed sterling service taking the GPS coordinates, even
though he was having his own hard time getting high enough to get home.
First error: In my nervous state immediately after the
landing I misread one of the coordinates (105 deg instead of the correct 106
deg). Luckily for me, there were people
on the ground who plotted my position quickly and the answer did not fit where
I said I was (about 18 miles north of Claunch -- actually about 20 miles). The repeat of the coordinates was corrected
over the radio, and then radio cover was lost as the other pilots landed at
Moriarty.
There was zero cell phone coverage. I walked about a mile to the east to the top
of a rise, hoping that might help. No
good. And then I walked a bit over a
mile and half up the hill the other way.
Still no good.
There was no sign of any human activity in any
direction; the farm buildings at the end of the landing field were empty and
the small house seemed to be abandoned. So a good decision: stick with the
plane, since the coordinates were known.
My nice empty field turned out not to be empty at
all. First sighting, two horses, which
emerged from the corral at the bottom of the field. They ventured out as I came back to the plane
(getting anywhere involved going under a barbed wire fence onto a dirt road 30
yards from the plane). They circled me
as I sat in the cockpit holding my breath.
One came up to the nose and snuffled the canopy – found nothing to taste
and they left.
Then a handful of cows appeared, one large brown one
and five or so younger black ones. They
came from a long way away – it was a very big field. They turned out to be well equipped with
testicles – not cows. They too circled
the plane and ended in a semi-circle in front, slowly advancing. I shrank down into the seat, covered my face
with my hat so that there were no beady eyes staring back at them and peered
round the edge of the hat. All I could
think of was Francois Pin at the Seniors a few years back, whose PW-5 was
totally wrecked by a bull who mistook it for a female object. That bull must have gotten lots of cuts from
the canopy shards, but I was inside this one.
One of the younger fully-equipped “cows” began to paw
the ground and was increasingly agitated.
Then the big fella took over. He
began to sway his head from side the side, throwing spittle way into the air,
the while kicking up large clouds of dust.
Oh Lordie! I
thought that I had read someplace that the thing to do was to turn up the radio
volume flat out and turn off the squelch – the noise would frighten them
away. So that’s what I did. Big mistake.
All of them stopped, turned directly facing me with their ears up and
began to move forward. I turned the
squelch off quick and held my breath.
They slowly lost interest and led by the big one moved
away, eating the vegetation as they went.
The radio didn’t connect with anything. I settled down to wait.
A vehicle came over the hill and turned away to the
north. I was yelling on the radio in
case it was someone from Moriarty. The
vehicle was towing a long cloud of dust so I couldn’t make out if it was towing
the trailer. Must have been somebody else. (Wrong, it was the retrieve crew going the
wrong way – they came within a mile and a half and if they had come down the
road to where I was, you would not be hearing any more about the incident.)
The wait stretched out. Eventually the sun began to set. The temperature dropped. I was warmly dressed, but as the sliver of a
new moon set too, soon after, it began to get very cold. Eventually I popped the chute and used it as
extra insulation. It helped but a lot
less than I expected.
The real problem: there is zero insulation from the
bottom and sides of the glider. Space
blankets (I didn’t have one) wouldn’t have helped much because in contact with
anything they simply conduct heat; it seems they work best when in the open air
completely enclosing the victim.
It was nearly midnight when headlights came over the
hill and down the dirt road by “my” field.
I leaped out of the cockpit and began waving my emergency-kit
flashlight. Bob Hudson was the first to
spot it and I began to walk towards the fence as the two pickups pulled
up. It was at this point that the
adrenaline of being rescued ran out. I
could feel myself begin to keel over, vision narrowed and I was grabbed by I
don’t who, pushed through the strands of the fence being held apart by unknown
feet and put into the back of Brian Resor’s truck by Jimmy Wier, wrapped up and
fed hot coffee.
Jim Cumiford reported that there was already frost on
the rear of the wings when he went to the plane to shut the canopy.
There will be more about the lessons learned about
what we really need to cope with the drop in temperature after dark in the high
desert, when more research has been completed.
The major problem of course is that a glider has very limited storage for
anything resembling a real survival kit.
There are immediate lessons. Take a couple of deep
breaths after you have landed, especially if, unlike my case, you have had a
bad landing. You may have just one
chance to get the correct coordinates to helpers. Learn how to get to the coordinates page on
your gps as surely as you know how to get to the release.
Do not rely on cell phones; they are pretty much
useless in large parts of the territory we fly over. The aircraft radio doesn’t work as a land
based communicator. I never heard anything on the radio and the people looking
for me never heard my periodic broadcasts, even when we were actually very
close.
I was damned lucky.
Thanks to the dedication of Bob Hudson, Jim Cumiford, Al Santilli, Brian
Resor and Jim Wier I was rescued. I am not sure how bad I would have been if I
had been out all night but I can tell you that because of the increasing cold I
was pretty much a basket case by midnight.
Retrieve
from Hell, the truth: I first heard that Howard was down on my
“handheld” as I was driving home from the airport. I immediately performed a 180 degree turn and
headed back to the airdrome to see if I could help. Upon arriving at the field I found that Jim
Cumiford had hooked up his truck to
Howard’s trailer. Inside his truck he
had an ace navigator, Al Santilli. The two of them had “plotted” Howard’s
location on a sectional, which proved to be totally inadequate as the sectional
doesn’t show dirt/county roads. We
recognized this discrepancy and stopped in Estancia to get a road map and “lo
and behold” these maps don’t have county roads either. This was frustrating because I had a complete
set of maps showing all dirt tracks in
We then pressed on towards Mountainair. Howard was blessed to have Jim along as Jim’s
family homesteaded the area near where Howard landed and he had a good handle
on the region. After about an hour we
started cross country on a series of dirt roads. One land mark we were searching for was a
line of high power poles that the sectional showed should have been within a
mile or so of where Howard was “picnicking”.
Well, after a while we stopped at a farm house, way out in nowhere, that
appeared occupied. The lady of the house
was most helpful and she tried to assist us. One thing she told us, and
confirmed with a phone call to her son, was that there was no string of high
power lines anywhere near where we were.
(So much for the sectional). I
went outside to talk to Al, who remained in the truck, and after what seemed
like forever, I went to see what was taking Jim so long. When I got back to the
House I found Jim and the lady doing the old “whatever happened to old cousin
Steve”… You see, Ms. Fitzgerald knew all of Jim’s family and in fact Jim had
worked with Ms. Fitzgerald’s husband.
Well we finally broke Jim away from the family reunion
and took off again in search of Howard. (Let me point something out, we weren’t
out to save Howard; we just couldn’t stand the thought of such a nice airplane
being left out to the elements…sorry Howard if the truth hurts.) As Howard said, we passed by him at about a
mile or so. We had been calling on the VHF radio religiously every one to two
minutes and as Howard said he never heard us nor us him…true line of sight devices.
After we passed by Howard’s location we entered an
extremely rugged canyon that we knew could not harbor his plane and the sun was
going down. We decided to get Al back to
the airport so he could go home and we would “reload” and give it another shot. Now you must remember that Howard’s location
was only 34 air miles from the airfield, but was about 65 miles by road. We got back to the airfield and met up with
Holger Weitzel, the German that is here flying his ASH 26. Holger had already
started to plot a location for Howard on a different set of charts. I got out
my DeLorme GPS maps and we were able to put Howard’s position right next to a
road.
Additionally I got my GPS, PDA and battery from my
airplane and we loaded up the coordinates and took off again. Brian Resor and Jimmy Weir started off at the
same time, only from
We got to Mountainair a little after eleven and soon
met up with Jimmy and Brian. The main
drag of Mountainair was quiet yet there seemed to be a steady stream of
“cruisers” who were eyeing these four guys who had maps spread out over the
hoods of their trucks, studying them with flashlights and carrying radios…I bet
there were more than a few phone calls made about the impending drug bust about
to go down.
Once we had our game plan down we took off and now
using GPS we were slowly closing in on Howard.
After about twenty minutes, Jim and I noticed that we were traveling
over familiar ground. We passed multiple
empty farmsteads that would have given you a sense of safety if you were
looking for a place to land, yet in reality Howard was nowhere near an occupied
farm/ranch. If we weren’t out looking
for him nobody would have gotten him until day break.
As we passed through an old abandoned feedlot, I
noticed a small white dot off in the distance.
That small white dot began to move and I mentioned to Jim that I either
had auto kinesis or that was someone waving a flashlight in the distance. Bingo. It was Howard. Once we pulled up the relief of finding
Howard was replaced by concern as he seemed just to crash in front of us.
Initially, he was all smiles and happy to see us and almost immediately he
stated shaking and appeared slightly incoherent. Jimmy got him into Brian’s truck and started
to pour coffee into him.
We then decided to get Howard home and recover the
aircraft the next day. We then split,
Brian, Jimmy and Howard off to
(Next month I will recount all the things we did wrong
and what we are going to do to become more efficient.)