darryl ramm’s blog

I have wanted to try flying a large wingspan open class glider for a while and now that the Williams Soaring Center has an ASH-25 “25H” available for rent I had to try it out. ASH-25s can have different wing tip/winglet options, and 25H as I flew it has a wingspan of 25.6 m. That’s 84 feet, or about three quarters of the wingspan of a Boeing 737 jet. The ASH-25 has an about a 60:1 glide ratio. For the mental arithmetic impaired, that means a theoretical glide range of about 110 miles from a height of 10,000 feet.

I flew with Kenny Price the instructor at Williams Soaring Center. Kenny has lots of time instructing and mentoring in ASH-25s. I really just wanted to see what flying such a large glider felt like and we only had time for two flights but I got the bug flying it so I’ll finish doing the rest of a checkout with Kenny as I get time.

The undercarriage in the ASH-25 is only lockable from the front seat. The rear seat passenger/pilot can assist moving the heavy gear with their undercarriage lever, this is similar as the original Duo Discus, something fixed in the Duo Discus X and XL.

The front seat is very comfortable, and high off the ground. You are sitting fairly reclined with a great view because of the low cut canopy rail. This reminded me of my DG-303 glider cockpit. The elevator trim indicator is on the right side of the cockpit, where in my ASH-26E it is on the left side, so I was always looking in the wrong place for the trim indicator.

It turns out this is the only glider I’ve flow with a CG tow hook, I’ve just been lucky and all other gliders I’ve flown have had a nose hook. Two reminders from Kenny to remember to pick up any dropped wing (should it occur) with rudder and not to let the glider balloon. With all that wing on the glider, pilots new to the ASH-25 apparently often have problems with it ballooning up behind the towplane as it starts to fly. I was probably overly worried about this and held the glider down too long on the first take off. Once I relaxed things got better quickly. On the second take off off it did drop the left wing a little and some right rudder brought it up.

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I had a great early season soaring flight out of Williams Soaring Center on March 1st, with an over 4 hour, 460km flight along foothills on the eastern edge of the Mendocino Mountain range. This was a chance to try out my SPOT Satellite Messenger again. The SPOT messenger is capable of sending manual “OK” and emergency messages my interest is using the messenger in “SPOTcast” mode where position reports (latitude, longitude and time, but not altitude) are sent automatically every 10 minutes.

SPOTcast messages are available on the SPOT website but unlike the manually sent messages they cannot be sent through email or SMS messaging. There is no ability to preview the web site before you purchase a SPOT so people often believe the SPOT web site can do a lot more than it currently does, and for example people assume that the SPOTcast messages get automatically displayed on a map and updated as new position reports come in. What is actually available is much simpler, current SPOTcast messages are displayed in a table, you select the ones you want plotted and click a button to plot on a Google map. See images of this user interface in my previous blog post on SPOT.

The SPOT messenger appeared to work flawlessly, as it has previously. An interesting recent addition to the SPOT website allows the SPOTcast reported locations to be saved in Google Earth kml file or GPS Exchange (GPX) formats. If you are interested in playing with this in Google Earth, here is spot_messages.kml the file containing the SPOTcast position reports from the SPOT web site and 831c4fv1.kml the kml flight trace produced from my flight logger submission to the OnlineContest (OLC). Just open both files in the same Google Earth session and you should see them overlaid as in the large screen shot image linked to the thumbnail above. In Google Earth you can click on each square “Track” point to show the corresponding time and latitude and longitude coordinates.

I’m still on my first set of Energizer AA Lithium batteries after several flights of several hours each. So while I’d have prefered the ability to use external 12 volts DC power, it does not look like battery life is an issue.

This year’s Soaring Society of America (SSA) Convention is in Albuquerque, NM, with main sessions running Thursday February 14th to Saturday February 17th.

I was working on what I wanted to see at the convention and arranging some side meetings and I ended up taking the convention schedule from the SSA Web site and reformatting it into an Excel spreadsheet. The Excel spreadsheet can generate a tab separated text file suitable for importing into Microsoft Outlook or to be printed or saved as a PDF. I’ve attached all formats here. In my case all I care about is having the schedule in my iPhone, I import the tab separated file into Outlook and then synch my iPhone to Outlook.

SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.xls (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.pdf (One page schedule printed from spreadsheet)
SSA_Convention_2008_Schedule_1.txt (Tab delimited text file saved from spreadsheet)

An example of how to import the tab delimited text file into Microsoft Outlook using the Import and Export Wizard is show below. This was tested with Outlook 2003 but other Outlook versions should work similarly.

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I’ll write up some more comprehensive comments on the SPOT satellite messenger soon, but in the meantime I wanted to provide some screen shots of the SPOT web site showing what is available from the optional SPOT Track Progress service from SPOT. Overall I’m impressed by the SPOT messenger and I will be using it in my glider, particularly when flying in remote areas to automatically track my location and as a supplement to my existing McMurdo Personal Locator Beacon (PLB). I purchased my SPOT messenger from my local REI store, it is also available at REI online.

SPOT is a subsidiary of Globalstar, the satellite phone company. The SPOT satellite messenger has an internal GPS receiver and sends the GPS coordinates and message type info via the Globalstar L-band simplex data network. Message types available are an automatic tracking message, or manually triggered events - a “911″ distress alert, a less severe “help” message or just an “OK” message.

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I love it when companies do creative “in your face” marketing, particuarly when it is creative enough to spread by word of mouth and hey if you can also have fun tweaking the competition then all the better. Having done my share of things like this I really found the following move by Alexander Schleicher against DG Flugzeugbau, two of the leading German sailplane manufactures, pretty funny.

Schleicher make the ASH-26E motorglider I fly, DG make the nice DG-1000S two seat glider I’ve enjoyed flying as a member of BASA (Bay Area Soaring Associates) and they designed the DG-303 sailplane I used to own. Hugh Milne a fellow Californian ASH-26E pilot returns from visiting friends in Germany and forwarded the photos here and this story.

In Spring 2007 DG delivered a new DG-1000S sailplane to HVL (Hamburger Verein für Luftfahrt), one of the largest Hamburg soaring clubs. With new sailplanes this normally involves a long wait, eager anticipation and exchange of lots of money. But the club members do not like the brown trim stripes on this glider. I’m not sure who specified brown, it’s a pretty unusual color for glider trim, anyhow the club members did not like the color. Since the club really wants their sailplane, they accept it, but have contacts at Alexander Schleicher and so drive it across Germany to the Schleicher factory in Poppenhausen so they can replace the trim on their competitor’s brand new sailplane.

Schleicher replaced the standard DG trim stripes with the latest style of their own distinctive “swoosh” underneath the canopies and added a little sign on the tail, which I am told means “With the best friendly greetings from Poppenhausen”. I think the Schleicher swoosh looks a lot better and more modern than the usual plain DG trim strips. Schleicher apparently charged about 300 Euros to cover the cost of materials. I bet the Schleicher factory had fun doing this.

I have heard from a HVL club member who flies the DG-1000S in contests etc. that it often takes other pilots quite a while to realize what is different with this glider.

There are photos of this DG-1000S online on the HVL club website.

The DG-1000S is a good glider, and by the way if you are a glider pilot and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, BASA have both a DG-1000S and DG-505 in their club fleet.

[This post has been corrected, only the trim was repainted, the base white paint on the DG-1000S was fine, and there was only one DG-1000S delivered. Photo credits. Copyright Hugh Milne, DG-1000S with new paint trim. Eckbert Andresen DG-1000S with brown trim. Used with Permission.]

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.

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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In late 2005 I installed a large (64W) solar panel on the Cobra trailer for my DG-303 glider and it has worked great. I get asked about the solar panels, so I thought I’d save some information here about it, largely stuff that has been posted in the past to private newsgroups. I’m going to be installing a similar set up on my ASH-26E trailer, but I may play with different charge controllers (more on that in future).

My DG-303 has dual 12 amp hour batteries. I have two sets of two batteries, so I can always have a set charging while the others are in use. I wanted to also be able to leave all four batteries in the trailer hooked up to the solar panel when the glider is not in use. With my glider the batteries need to be removed from the glider for disassembly so it made sense to just make a mount for four batteries in the trailer rather than charge some in the fuselage of the glider parked in the trailer.

I wanted a significant amount of solar power available; something like enough to fully charge a fairly well used pair of batteries on a good sunny day. This meant a large panel with charge controllers, a place to mount four batteries and one or more solar charge controllers depending on the charging scheme. All up costs for this project was around $600 - it could be done for less without some of the over engineering in my set up.

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