Movies

Most movies are in H.264 MPEG-4. QuickTime or VLC are best for playback. Option-click to download.

The Nuthouse in Ojai '09

Point of the Mountain tour on the Sigma 7
2008 Ojai XC & Thermal Clinic SHORT
2008 Ojai XC & Thermal Clinic
2007 Ojai XC & Thermal Clinic

Closet Cleaning for Summer!

We're doing a little closet cleaning for the Summer season so we have some gear that MUST go!

The following are still available as of 10/28/09

UP Makalu 2 - Small 65-85 kg - Red/Grey
Kited in a field 3 times but otherwise brand new! Stellar gliders for brand new through intermediate pilots! This is one of my favorite beginner gliders.
$2100
Makalu 2

Windtech WINDSOS Reserve - Small (31) - Max Weight 105 Kg.
Brand new. It's been sitting in a closet for 2 years so it's time to go!
These are great, reliable reserves. I've repacked a number of these for people and those that have used them haven't had any complaints!
$500
WINDSOS

Give us a call or send us an email if you have an interest in any of these things!

Big Ears: Rethinking Our Rationale

An article I wrote in '08 after seeing several "enlightening" events involving Big-Ears.

We've all been there. We've all done it. We've all wanted or needed to get down, preferably 5 minutes ago, for any number of imaginable reasons and an equally vast number of unimaginable ones. We have all, at some point in our time as pilots, thought "If I make my glider the size of a marmot pelt, I should pick up a few extra miles per hour and get down faster!" The logic works doesn't it? Smaller surface area, increased wing loading, speed increases with wing loading...just what we were looking for! We all remember that stuff from our training...Right? As an added bonus our gliders feel more stable in turbulence and we don't have to worry about the bumps! This is the part where you should hear a little voice that sounds suspiciously like Scooby-Do saying "RUH-ROH!"
To understand the problems, and why big-ears are so commonly used in inappropriate circumstances we have to understand the up-side to big-ears and what happens while they’re installed. Increased descent rate without compromising speed? Check. We can see it on our instruments and it's quantifiable. This is, after all, the primary reason we use big-ears. Increased wing loading? Check. Make your glider smaller and you're suspending the same weight from a smaller wing. We could measure it with the right instruments but we shouldn't need to. Increased angle of attack? Absolutely, and like an increase in wing loading, it's a byproduct of big-ears. You can't have one without the other. Without increasing your horizontal speed the angle at which the air is intersecting the chord increases. It's debatable as to whether the angle increases to a dangerous level, but it does happen to some degree and could, in some conditions, be an important factor.
But how do we get ourselves into trouble with such a common, useful, and if used properly, safe maneuver? Unfortunately it often goes all the way back to our training, where we learned that increasing the wing loading, however we choose to do it, increases all our speeds, makes our glider less susceptible to deflations, and that big-ears is one way of increasing our wing loading. It's an explanation that leaves out a myriad of variables. As eager students we instantly deduce that big-ears are the perfect method for getting into tight landing zones, dealing with turbulence that makes us uncomfortable, often on approach to a landing zone, or escaping "park-out" where our ground speed is 0 or negative. We like to think of big-ears positively. "What can they do for me?" rather than "What does it cost me?"
The reality is that using big-ears to descend lower on a windy ridge may put us in a position with less wind and thus increase our ground speed, but no matter how much we wish they did, big-ears do not increase our airspeed. The extra drag from all that limp fabric flapping in the breeze conveniently negates any increase in speed we would have gained through higher wing loading. Some high performance gliders may actually lose air-speed while in big-ears. Using speed-bar in conjunction with big-ears (big-ears first, then speed-bar) would clearly help our penetration and decrease our angle of attack, but using an appreciable amount of speed-bar close to the ground isn't recommended. I wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that descending below 500 feet AGL with speed-bar applied in turbulent conditions is a good idea. It's most definitely not.
What about getting into tight landing zones or dealing with turbulence? Tight landing zones are often tight because they're surrounded by trees, buildings, and an assortment of other turbulence inducing nuisances. By using big-ears to descend steeply into a landing zone you are gambling that the amount of turbulence behind the obstacles will be less than the turbulence required to disfigure your glider in its highly loaded state. Remember that you already have a higher angle of attack and while holding onto the outside A-lines it's utterly impossible to be an active pilot. For those unfamiliar with the term active piloting, it's what we do when we sense the glider through the brake toggles and harness, and translate those senses into properly timed inputs that keep the glider flying the way we want it to. With big-ears installed you have no surge control or feedback from the glider through the brake lines not to mention diminished directional control. It's like driving a 4WD road with both hands on the dashboard. One should always be an active pilot, but of all the times to be especially vigilant, flight close to the ground should rank high. To add to the complexity of landing, if you did suffer an unexpected glider disfigurement or surge while in big ears and you released the outside A-lines to apply brake, you're now dealing with high wing loading, an increased stall speed and a bunch of brake to stop the surge. Messy.
Very, very tiny big ears don’t solve the problem! By using very small ears you gain none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. Your descent rate wont increase much, your hands are occupied with something other than active piloting, and you don't gain any real increase in stability through wing loading. You'd be better off yelling to someone on the ground to throw you a rope or some lead bricks.
Wouldn't the turbulence required to disfigure a glider in big-ears be greater than the turbulence required to disfigure a glider without big-ears? Not if you're being an active pilot. Be a pilot! Fly the glider and take command of your aircraft. Active piloting is much better at preventing glider disfigurement than passively hoping that big-ears will. Remember, big-ears are a descent maneuver, not a deflation prevention maneuver. By using big-ears as a band-aid for poor planning, fear, lack of skill, or lack of knowledge, you are taking yourself out of the equation and placing your fate in the hands of your environment. Planet earth is hard, and the atmosphere has no pity. If you have the altitude for it, and you no longer want to be involved in piloting your aircraft, come up with another descent maneuver. I'm a big fan of B-Line stalls and spirals. In a B-Line stall your glider is no longer flying and is significantly less likely to require inputs from you. As with most maneuvers, get training at a maneuvers course before doing a B-line stall. Once you've descended to within 500-1000 feet of the ground, exit your descent maneuver of choice and actively pilot your glider to the ground. Obviously any horizontal wind component will be a deciding factor since in a B-Line stall or spiral you will drift downwind at at whatever rate the wind speed happens to be.
So why do we bother learning how to do big-ears? Is there any appropriate place to use them? Absolutely! We learn how to do them because they're a handy tool for escaping clouds or descending at a moderate speed in reasonably smooth air (your bump tolerance may vary). Big-ears is also the only descent method that doesn't compromise our progress toward a goal. You can install ears and still be zipping along at or at least near trim speed which make it a great method for escaping cloud suck or getting down to 1000ft AGL over a buoyant landing zone. When nearing cloud-base, and think you may be unable to make it to the edge before whiting out, toss in big-ears, pick a direction and make a quick exit. It's a band-aid for poor planning but is still better than illegally entering a cloud. If the cloud suck is extremely strong, use a faster descent method, lose some altitude, then go back to big-ears.
Used in the right situations big-ears can be a safe and useful descent method. Used inappropriately it's a sloppy band-aid for poor planning, or fear, and is significantly riskier than actively piloting your glider.

Chris Grantham is an advanced nomadic instructor, and a nomadic advanced instructor. He is also extremely handsome and charming and expects to gain fame and fortune through the cunning use of chap-stick, hazel nuts, and small woodland creatures.

Wind Speed Probes

In another response to a question about Wind Probes I put together this short explanation on why cheaper is better!

If you absolutely MUST have one, get a simple Hall Airspeed Indicator. The usual anemometers you see folks holding up at your local ridge are impeller driven (with a little propeller) and what they're measuring is the speed of the air molecules as they pass through the impeller. However, they do not compensate for air temperature or density (density altitude) and so have little bearing on how flyable or unflyable it is unless you happen to be at sea level and the temp is 59ºF. The Hall airspeed indicators will compensate for pressure, temperature, etc. The reason that's important, especially in places where you're likely to be launching at high altitude, is that if you measure the wind speed with an impeller at 10,000 ft you'll get a 15% faster reading than if you measure it with a Hall meter. To better illustrate my muddled explanation, here's an example:

You have a hall meter and an impeller attached to your toes, in clean air flow. You launch from sea level at 59ºF and go hands up on your glider. Both wind probes read 22mph. As you climb, the impeller driven meter will begin to read faster because your glider is moving through less dense air and your true airspeed increases (it has to move faster through the air in order to generate the same lift with fewer molecules). However, the Hall meter will continue to read 22 mph because the pressure being exerted on it remains the same, as it does on your glider.

If you are already stuck with one of those battery eating, propeller spinning, whizzbang wind-gadgets you can do a quick recalculation to get close to the results of a Hall probe. For every 3k feet above sea level subtract 1 Mph from your indicated wind speed. So, for example, you're standing on a 10,000 ft mountain and are getting a reading of 20 Mph. Subtract ~3.3 Mph to get a reading of 16.7 Mph which is what the wind should feel like anyway.

Hall meters are about half the price and don't require batteries!

Performance, Speed-To-Fly & Instability Calculator

I was reminded recently that I had created a Performance, IAS & Atmospheric Instability calculator to satisfy my own curiosity and it was collecting dust in a long forgotten folder. So here it is, unleashed upon the public in Apple Numbers '09. It calculates:

• True Airspeed at Altitude
• Lapse Rate/Thermal Index
• Polar Curves based on 4 points corrected for weight and Density Altitude
• Altitude lost along course compensated for wind & weight
• Time to goal compensated for wind & weight
• Relative Altitude lost for comparing up to 4 gliders
• Altitude advantages compensated for early arrival time with an X climb rate along course
• Speed-To-Fly based on polar curve, wind, sink along course, and expected climb rate

• Scoring penalty percentage to handicap high performance gliders. Used this at Tater Hill '08 to level the field. DHV 1 gliders were scored evenly with 2-3 ships.
• Speed-To-Fly chart (Hoisington Chart) that can be printed and used in flight.

2/20/09- The Performance Calculator has been in constant development for the last few days and it now calculates Speed-To-Fly automatically! Still Apple Numbers 2.0 only but if someone wants to convert it to Excel, please do and send me the results! Email me if you find any bugs. I'm always curious about who is using it so if you do, send me an email!

2/21/09-Fixed a bug that relates to Speed-To-Fly calculations. New version is 2.5.1.

Flight Calculator 2.5.1

2/23/09-Updated to 2.5.2. Fixed a few bugs, added instructions, and the sinking air along the route is now included in the "altitude lost" along route. No idea why I didn't do that sooner.

Flight Calculator 2.5.2

3/5/09-2.5.4 is out. It fixes a few bugs, and adds a new sheet for generating a Speed-To-Fly chart that can be used in flight. It's an almost exact duplicate of the chart Zach Hoisington used for his Speed-To-Fly lecture at Woodrat a few years ago. This one you can customize to your gliders polar curve, wing loading, etc. Currently you have to enter some values manually, but I'll be working on an automatic solution for 2.5.5.

3/5/09-2.5.5 is out. It fixes a few more bugs, streamlines a few calculations, and makes the Speed-To-Fly values a little more accurate, now to the nearest .25 rather than the nearest .5. An automatic method for generating the Speed-To-Fly chart doesn't seem to be possible at the moment which is why 2.5.5 is so close on the heels of 2.5.4. It just isn't going to happen.

3/7/09-2.6 is done. A bunch of bug fixes to the Hoisington Chart in 2.5.5. Streamlined all the calculations to make future updates easier, and...*drumroll*...The calculations for the Hoisington Chart are now almost completely automatic AND you can choose which glider you want it to chart! The defaults should be fine but if you want to adjust it for slightly more accurate readings you can. The steps for generating the chart are now infinitely simpler. The ONLY known bug left is an artifact of how gliders are tested, and small errors in the Density Altitude calculations. The problem lies in the fact that most gliders are tested at 4,921 ft but are entered into the tables as if they were tested at sea level. So to get real sea level speeds for gliders the altitude has to be adjusted to -4,921 ft. Entering the gliders as if they were tested at sea level (slower speeds) results in an error of ~1.5 km/hr when the altitude is raised to 4921 ft. Treating 4,921 ft as your baseline altitude (entered as 0 in the chart) solves the problem, at least mentally.

For folks who don't have Apple Numbers 2.0 (part of iWork '09) and want to know what all this is all about, I've created a PDF of the default gliders. Calculator.PDF

3/9/09-2.6.1 is done. New life lesson, never declare all your bugs fixed. There's always one lurking in the shadows and this one was so obvious it's embarrassing to admit that I missed it the last 4 versions. So, the Expected Climb rate no longer affects the glide ratio in the Speed-To-Fly table above and beyond what the required speed bar would do to your glide ratio. Previously a 200 fpm expected climb would cut your glide ratio value in half....oopse. I've also cleaned up the layout a bit, removed some redundant stuff, etc. It should now also fit on a 13" widescreen monitor without scrolling.

3/17/09-2.6.2 makes a few big changes. I've added S2F Gain to the arrival altitude chart. It shows how much higher you would arrive if you flew at the proper Speed-To-Fly. The Time chart also shows times for S2F. The Polar curve graph now no longer allows the S2F indicator dot to exceed the 100% speed-bar value. That applies to the S2F table as well. The Polar Curves Table and Input tables have been changed to allow for different weights for each glider. That will allow two pilots to compare two different gliders, rather than one pilot looking at what their performance would be on each of the 4 gliders.

Ruminations on Surviving as an Instructor

This is a short post I made to the paraglidingforum.com in response to a relatively new pilot's request for information on turning paragliding into a career. Despite being a bit of a disjointed brain-dump it received a good response so I thought I'd archive it here for anyone who is interested.

In my experience there are 3 ways to survive. Run your own school, with a base, a safe and consistent place to fly and be a dealer for 2 or more brands. You work your back end off but you do it because you like being outside all day with cool people.

You can get hooked up with a tandem operation in one of the "hot spots" like Sun Valley, Aspen, Queenstown, British Columbia, or almost anywhere in Europe. You have to have the Tandem gig down to a science. If you've blown a bunch of solo launches in the last 12 months, don't even think about it. It's good work but tougher to form those bonds with students/passengers that are so rewarding.

Finally, the route I've taken. I've been roaming the country working for lots of different schools which has been extremely educational. If it's consistent/year-round, with someone who treats you well, it can be a lot of fun and pay the bills. Unfortunately the seasons change and Winters are slow so you'll often find yourself in conservation mode. What you make in the good season, pays for thumb-twiddling or traveling in the off season. Some instructors will head south of the equator for the Winter and get year-round work that way.

A couple tips: Don't do it halfway. Immerse yourself in it, research everything, and find the best possible information. Don't settle for being a mediocre instructor. Work for the best possible schools, especially early in your career. You'll learn more from them in a season than you will at any 3 day clinic. Don't compromise your ethics or principles, even if it costs you some work. If a school owner or "more experienced" instructor asks (or tells you!) to do something that you know is wrong, don't do it! The best piece of advice I've ever been given was at Doug and Denise's up in Eastern Washington (Aerial Paragliding): "If I have to write an accident report about this am I going to look stupid?" Don't bother working for people who won't treat you well or are going to put a black mark on your safety record. It's not worth the stress, money, or your reputation. It's not an easy lifestyle so the people you work with should be fun, treat you well, and make it worthwhile. It's not necessary, but makes it much more fun when you have new information/skills to offer the school, and vise versa. Obviously the school should place an appropriate value on the information/skils you bring to the program, and if they don't you're being used. You're not just getting paid in cash, you're getting paid in experience and information. It's a little less interesting when they don't have any experience relevant to your teaching career left to offer. The more places you've taught, and the more you know about tandems, PPG, towing, XC, mountain flying, flatland flying, different equipment, etc etc, the more valuable and desirable you are as an instructor.

If it's going well, treat your employer well, have fun, and soak up as much info as possible. There will be times where you botch something up, do something differently than the way your employer does it, etc and you take a blow to the ego. It's not personal. If what they're saying makes sense (it doesn't always but be open minded), do it!

If it's not going well, get out! I lost a good bit of money getting to an operation south of the equator, where I worked for 9 days before realizing that carnage was imminent and I didn't want to watch it happen. It was an expensive waste of time but had I stayed it would have cost a lot more. My suspicions were confirmed when I later met another instructor who worked for the same operation and stuck it out for the Winter.

Write a syllabus! It's something you can hand to your students, and a way to show schools you'd like to work for that you know what you're doing. Start it as a sort of notebook of tips, tricks, techniques etc. Then write your syllabus based on that. If an instructor that has one gives you permission you can adapt yours from theirs. Keep it up to date with the latest info! It'll also help you after the Winter season to refresh on how, what, and in what order you want to teach a course. It's invaluable during ground schools because every student gets the same information in the same way, every time.

Get comfortable leading students through ground school and know the information! I was one of those shy kids in school and the thought of standing up in front of a group and taking control of a classroom gave me dry-mouth and sweaty palms. When it came to teaching ground school it took me a long time to really feel comfortable but practice makes perfect and having confidence that the information you have is 100% spot-on will make a huge difference. I find that most instructors who are uncomfortable teaching ground school either don't know the information inside and out, or aren't sure why the information they have is correct and are worried that they're going to be asked a question that they can't answer.

As for expectations; eat cheap, work hard, have fun! You're not going to get rich, but it's worth it! The perks are good and many schools will include you as an instructor on their trips so you get to travel, usually with some of the same students you've been teaching during the past year.

Bell Drop Helmets

We have a limited supply of Bell Drop helmets in stock! We like these helmets because they provide significantly more protection than even the best paragliding helmets while still being light, with great visibility. They conform to the new ASTM DownHill mountain bike standard which far exceeds the protection of the CPSC bicycle helmet standard and the EN 966 Free Flight helmet standard. The visor is completely removable to avoid snagging on your lines and the liner can be removed for washing. $130 for all sizes with free shipping! Give us a call to order yours today!