darryl ramm’s blog

Here are the slides and some useful web links from a talk I gave about flying across the Sacramento Delta at a Valley Soaring Association (VSA) meeting at Williams Soaring on November 17th 2007 . This is one in a series of talks that VSA will be running before the start of the 2008 spring season. In this case I was highlighting some late 2007 season flights I made in pursuit of the PASCO egg capture trophy.

A take way from this talk was a request for pilots flying in the Sacramento Delta to have their gliders transponder equipped and to participate in flight following (i.e. use VFR advisory services) with Travis Approach. I also touched on some interesting tools including SeeYou and the flight simulator in Google Earth. The slides likely won’t be self explanatory unless you were there. There was a live review of three of my flights using SeeYou that are not captured in the slides.

Slides from this talk are available in PDF (3.5MB) or PowerPoint (9.3MB).

Other useful links from this talk

• PASCO egg capture trophy rules and log
• Dr Jack NAM and RUC Blipmaps that cover the Sacramento Delta
• Unisys AVN weather forecasts
• Naviter SeeYou for flight planning analysis
• GlidePlan for flight planning and printing sectional charts.
• Google Earth, specifically try to play with it in flight simulator mode to fly along your flight traces converted using GPS Visualizer or OLC.
• GPS Visualizer for turning IGC flight trace files into Google Earth kml/kmz files
• OLC can also produce Google Earth kml/kmz files from an IGC file submitted to the OLC. (I prefer GPS Visualizer as it produces cleaner default traces, but you can always tweak the appearance of traces within Google Earth.)
• Travis Air Force Base Mid Air Collission Avoidance (MACA)
  • Especially see the Word documents MACA Pamplet (lots of useful stuff about Travis Approach, flight following, hazards etc.) and Travis Radar Limitation (Lack of primary radar coverage over the wind farms near Travis)
  • In case Word format is a problem I’ve copied PDFs versions of these documents here: MACA Pamplet (PDF) and Travis Radar Limitation (PDF)
• Transponders in Sailplanes (PDF) by Eric Greenwell.
• Some general information on San Francisco Bay Area ATC and an interesting little web site in general

Here are traces of all the flights I could find that cross the Sacrmento Delta in 2007. You can open the .kmz files in Google Earth.

If there are any mistakes here or you know of other flights or want to provide missing IGC files let me know.