Marking up Sectional Charts
This note is aimed at BASA members new to cross-country soaring who are flying dual with me or other pilots in the BASA DG-1000 out of Hollister.
Something useful for first cross country flights are sectional charts marked up with airstrips, other know landable locations and non-landable waypoints used for position reporting etc. You should do this as a back-up even if you plan on using a GPS or PDA. If you do have a GPS or PDA then try to make sure that the waypoint database in the GPS or PDA and the waypoint marked on the map agree with each other.
A landing location, or even non-landable turn point, marked without its elevation is next to useless. So at each location I usually mark the waypoint name, and elevation in feet and any critical information like “power lines” or “land to the west”. If it is a landable location I’ll mark it as a small circle, if it is a navigation waypoint I use a small dot. You can use full SeeYou style waypoint symbols or whatever you want but you should clearly differentiate landable locations and non-landable waypoints.
Non landable waypoints are important, you will use them for reporting position and they sometimes are used to mark usual good lift locations like EL1 (aka “elevator one” but commonly pronounced ee-el-won), EL2, EL3, EL4 and EL5 around Panoche.
Waypoint Data Sources
There are two original sources of information on Hollister area waypoints and landout sites. One is the waypoint file maintained by Ramy Yanetz and available for download from the Soaring Turnpoint Exchange. Spend some time looking around the Soaring Turnpoint Exchange, it provides both human readable waypoint files and the same data formatted for your particular GPS or flight computer. If you fly in other areas you will typically download waypoints from the Soaring Turnpoint Exchange.
The other source of information is the Hollister Landout Database originally developed by Michael Deleo. This contains some comments of landout sites and photos. It is worth studying this information, maybe adding comments form it to waypoints marked on a sectional chart, maybe even printing out a copy of the database to carry in the glider.
In addition if you have SeeYou (the Windows PC program) Jonathan Hughes has created a useful set of waypoints by merging Ramy’s Hollister waypoints with waypoint files from Williams, Truckee and Parowan and others into a single SeeYou waypoint .CUP file. This file called Points.CUP is downloadable from the files section (membership required) of the Hollister Gliding Club Yahoo group. Although not guaranteed to perfectly match each set of other waypoint files (e.g. if you are racing at Williams you should use their exact waypoint file) I find Jonathan’s file very useful to load up into SeeYou (desktop) and then only have to deal with one waypoint file regardless of where I’m flying.
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Marking up Sectional Charts
The process of marking up waypoints on a chart itself is a great way to get oriented to the Hollister area. There are three ways to do this; manually, with help from SeeYou (desktop) or using Glide Plan.
For Soaring out of Hollister I usually join the south half of San Francisco sectional chart to the north half of a Los Angeles sectional chart and trim a strip from the joined chart that runs parallel to the coast and out past Interstate 5 as shown in the image at left. I then fold the strip a few times so it is easy to use in flight. An idea of what this looks like is shown in the image at left. This is a large area but covers most the usual possible flights to the south of Hollister. You don’t need to do this, you might prefer not join the sectional charts, it does not matter, do whatever you want. The important thing is that you do have sectional chart that are marked up with local waypoints and landout options. Out of Hollister I will also carry with me full San Francisco and Los Angeles sectional charts just in case I get really lucky and fly off the chart area shown at left.
Manual Markup
To make it easy to locate waypoints on sectional chart I’ve saved an image from SeeYou that shows the core area where we are most likely to fly around Hollister, click on the image at left to see the full resolution image. The waypoints from the Hollister turnpoint database file are shown overlaid on the sectional charts. You can use his jpg image to help locate where to mark waypoints on your sectional charts.
You will need to look up the altitude to mark next to each waypoint directly from the waypoint file. The elevation data comes from the raw waypoint files at the Soaring Turnpoint Exchange — look at the Control Point links, either the PDF file or the plain text file (the eyeglass icon). You will see the waypoint elevation in feet and other comments, some of the other comments about landout locations should be marked to the charts next to the waypoint. Especially look for comments about a landing site not being usable, required landing directions, warnings of obstacles etc.. As you mark up each waypoint also check for information about that waypoint in the Hollister Landout Database.
Marking Up Sectional Charts Using SeeYou
If you have a copy of Naviter SeeYou for your PC you can use that to help mark up the Sectional Charts. You still mark up the waypoints by hand on a sectional chart, but SeeYou helps show the the waypoint location and comments. First download and install the sectional chart raster images into SeeYou. This may be easier said than done, since SeeYou can be complicated to configure, for now email me if you get stuck. Use SeeYou in Waypoint view mode and double click on each waypoint to bring up the waypoint editor dialog box to see information such as field elevation and comments.
Marking Up Sectional Charts Using GlidePlan
GlidePlan, is an interesting software package by Bay Area glider pilot Matt Herron. Earlier versions of GlidePlan allowed printing custom sectional charts and glide circles and were useful for training and first cross country flights. However, once you get little experience flying cross country you are not going to mark glide circles on sectional charts. GlidePlan version 2, currently in beta, will print custom sectional charts marked with waypoints landout sites (and glide circles if yuou want) and this makes it interesting to cross country pilots of all levels of experience.
Glide Plan version 2 Beta can be downloaded
Regardless of how I mark up or print custom sectional charts, I will also carry actual current sectional charts with me.
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