Glider flying in heavy turbulence over Utah mountains

A couple of instances while flying my glider over the beautiful Utah mountains where I hit a strong nasty pocket of turbulent air - enjoy!

Video of Bruno Vassel IV flying an ASW-20B 15-meter sailplane using a Canon HF20 HD camcorder with a .3 fish eye lens over a few flights in 2010.

Category:

Sports

Tags:

• glider
• turbulence
• sailplane
• asw20
• asw-20
• gliding
• Bruno
• Vassel
• Utah
• mountains

[BigRedNZ1]

What's "The yellow arc"?

[bviv]

@BigRedNZ1 That is the upper airspeeds you fly where you need to be more careful on the controls and in turbulence. Gliders are built crazy strong but you still want to fly within limits. Bruno

[TheQuiksilvr]

what happens if you start loosing lift in the mountains and start descending? is there a chute for the glider?

[HotelPapa100]

@TheQuiksilvr You should never fly into a situation where you cannot safely glide out to a field that is landable. As modern gliders have glide ratios of above 1:40 thats not so much of alimitation. In the mountains you must allow for heavy downdrafts as well. People who do not adhere to these rules sooner or later end up on an accident report.

Remember the saying: There's old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots.

[bviv]

@HotelPapa100 Completely agree with HotelPapa100. On video it looks like there is no place to land but in these videos we had farmers' fields within just 5-10 miles at the most and we needed only a glide ration of 10/1 to get there. That gives plenty of margin if you hit crazy bad sink. Mountain flying is very unforgiving. I lost a good friend to a mountainside just a year ago. Good reminder. Bruno

[bviv]

@TheQuiksilvr No but most of the time we are flying over a single mountain ridge and there are fields just down at the foot of the mountains. You just glide down to the ridges and land in a field. Trust me, have done it many times. :) Bruno

[waltergiordani]

Bel video Bruno!!

[bviv]

@6btl6 Thanks for the kind words. If you start watching my videos you will see that there is plenty of bad techniques and mediocre soaring skills but, as you said, that is what makes this sport so amazingly fun, challenging and keeps us pilots coming back to do it for our lifetimes. Bruno

[HotelPapa100]

@bviv Just to clarify: I did not mean to say that you were not adhering to the rules stated above, but reading again over my post I see that it can be read that way. I merely meant to explain @TheQuicksilvr how we safely fly in mountinous terrain.

[misichuri]

hey great flying