darryl ramm’s blog

I did a self launch endorsement this week with Rolf Peterson. Flying out of Byron airport in Rolf’s Grob 109B. We also flew over to Tracy and shot some touch and go landings there.

Besides covering motor glider specific things, the training was a great general early season warm up and Rolf really helped me brush up my skills. The endorsement is required by the FAA and by my insurance company but since motor gliders vary so much I need more than a generic motorglider endorsement in a Grob 109 for handling a retracting engine motorglider like my ASH-26E. I’ll be working with the team at Williams Soaring on that ASH-26E specific training and sign off.

Since the Grob 109 is a three wheel taildragger with break away castering tail wheel it handles similar to Citabrias, Piper Cubs or other taildragger powered aircraft. I went and read The Compleat Taildragger Pilot (Amazon or PilotMall) which seems to be the training book prefered by many taildragger instructors, including Rolf. I also picked up a copy of Taildragger Tactics by Spark Imeson (know for writing The Mountain Flying Bible). Taildragger Tactics covers more than just tail dragger handling, from cold weather operation to tie-downs. Both books seem really good. I’ll be even more respectful next time I see tow pilots kissing the ground with a wheel landing in a Pawnee.

The Grob 109, it is a relatively low performance glider but it is a sweet toy. Since it is a touring style motorglider, transitions between powered and glider flight are easy and the Grob 109 is capable of higher speed cruise flight than motor gliders with a retractable pylons.

An added bonus was that Rolf’s hangar is next to one that houses Airshows America. So we popped our heads in there and admired their L-39s, MIG-17s, Pitts Special, and other toys.

My ASH-26E was delivered to the port in Germany and should be on the ship by now. Uli Kremmer of Alexander Schleicher personally delivered it to the port, now that’s service. The instrument panel looks great, I was worried whether everything would fit or not. The only problem I can see was the paint swoosh on the fuselage was supposed to be curved and ended up straight.

I’m curious about the high tech looking tail lights on the Cobra trailer. All Cobra trailers I’ve seen used old style incandescent tail lights and I’ve had problems with water leaking into the trailer through the old style lights, casuing me to replace the lights on my current trailer with LED truck tail lights. I’m hoping these new tail lights mean I don’t need to do that with the new trailer.

I try to prune back on how much junk mail I get and what I do get goes into a shredder (Fellowes OD1500C, great shredder) without a second glance. Exceeeeept this one which caught my attention, for well marketing reasons :-). Now while I’m thinking about whether I need to spend $12 on a years for a subscription to Playboy I’m more curious where Playboy got my address from and which lists would Playboy correlate with high marketing responses. I don’t think Lexus or Porsche would sell my address. Maybe from my Flying, Fine Woodworking, Stereophile, Widescreen Review, Car & Driver, Road & Track , Excellence (Porsche) magazine subscriptions? Maybe Playboy trolls the FAA pilots database? My Health club/gym membership? Mmmm.

I was crusing the aisles at Whole PayCheck the other day and noticed these Kettle brand Organic Chipolte Chili Barbeque potato chips. Junk food nowdays comes low sugar, reduced fat, trans-fat free and yes, sigh, organic. I mean you’d hate to be eating any non-organic bad things with those oh so good for you deep fried chips.

The trouble is being a chilie head I had to try them. The worse problem is they taste great. Net weight five oz. Five servings per container — who are they kidding? Once opened that packet is mine. At one serving per container thats 38% of daily calories, 70% of daily total fat, 25% daily saturated fat… but 10g of protein, 40% of daily fibre, 70% of daily vitamin C, and Organic to boot. Hey, almost good for you. Ugh now I’ve really got to go work out at the gym.

It is pretty embarrassing when the premier news publication in Silicon Valley can’t get basic email to their readers right. Like not a clue.

I used to get one useful news summary email each morning from the Mercury News. I found it useful and I was more than happy to put up with the advertisements. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting spammed a few times by the Mercury News with sponsored email from them on behalf of advertisers but the worst is that they seem to be doing insane experiments on their readers with poorly formatted html email. So badly formatted I will not read it. I’m using Yahoo!Mail Beta, but this stuff looks awful under Microsoft Outlook. It looks better under gmail but that’ s because gmail strips the background image, the text formatting and column layout is still awful.

I mean why would anybody with even the slightest clue about html portability try to stick background images in html emails? The screen shots show yesterday’s email rendered in Yahoo!Mail (Beta) and in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

There is just no need for attempting the overly complicated html formatting they are trying to do, and even if the design changes were justified there is no need to be slamming experiments out to all their reader base until have the formatting stable. Oh and you would think that they had email preferences for receiving plain text emails instead of mis-formatted html. Think again (or good luck finding them if they exist). That link at the top “If you cannot see this newsletter correctly, please see out online version here” needs the “If” replaced with a “Since”. Sigh.

It is just about the start of another soaring season so I’ve had my glider annual inspection performed and getting other things ready including having my emergency parachute repacked. While doing that I also dropped of some of BASA’s (my gliding club) parachutes for a repack.

Emergency parachutes have to be repacked every 120 days. This allows an inspection of the condition of the parachute and case, and internal items such a the rubber bands that hold the parachute lines in place. I have my parachute repacked by Allen Silver at Silver Parachute. Allen is a FAA master parachute rigger, an aerobatic pilot and specializes in repacks of parachutes for glider and aerobatic pilots. He has several thousand parachute jumps under his belt, I have none and will be happy to keep it that way.

Anybody who uses an emergency parachute should attend one of Allen’s talks on care and use of emergency parachutes, get your parachute harness adjusted properly by Allen and do an ‘executive repack’ where he walks through doing a repack on your chute while you are there. That way you’ll learn a lot about the parachute and whats inside the pack.

One thing that Allen encourages before a repack, and I always do, is to put your parachute on go though the steps of a simulated bail out (protect your face/head, eject canopy, release harness, fight your way out of the cockpit, head first over the side if possible, look for and grab the ripcord, keep your legs together if you can, pull the ripcord, throw away the ripcord handle, look up and grab the steering handles, etc…). You can see me pulling the ripcord in the top photo on the left. The coil spring loaded pilot chute is flying out of the pack. The other photos show Allen holding the pilot chute, the parachute steering handles (gold colored in this case), and the rubber bands holding the parachute risers in place in the pack.

Allen has several articles on emergency parachute use and care available here.

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I purchased a Clarity Aloft headset for use in my motor glider. The Clarity Aloft is a passive in-ear headset that uses Comply brand foam earbud tips to provide great noise isolation.

The switch box on the Clarity Aloft has a master volume control, an 2.5mm stereo audio jack for auxilary input for music or cell phone and a stereo/mono switch. Since it is entirely passive there is no radio mute on the auxilary input. The headset looks well made and is comfortable to wear, even while wearing sunglasses and an oxygen cannula hooked over my ears. I think the headset will just hang over my neck when not in use.

Some people hate how in-ear style phones feel, but I already have several very nice phones from Etymotic Research for music listing (middle photo at left) and really like them. The Etymotic ear phones come with several different types of ear plug tips, including their standard soft plastic white flanged tips and Comply foam tips on some models. Etymotic claim 35 dB isolation for the white three flange tips and 41db isolation for the Comply foam tips.

Other motor glider pilots using earphones with Comply tips have complained that it can be inconvenient to have to squeeze and mess around inserting the foam tips in your ear especially when needing to do a quick in-air engine start. The Etymoics white plastic tips by comparison just plug in without needing to be squeezed or rolled between your fingers first.

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