Final Glide

Continuing the write-up about a typical race flight, I was going to describe the Climb and Cruise phases, but after yesterday's epic Final Glide it seems more appropriate to jump to that today.

During the Climb and Cruise phases you continuously gain height in the climb and lose height in the Cruise (Glide). There comes a point where you may think you have enough height to cruise for home. Remember, every time you stop to climb (turn) you are not going forward, so you want to climb as little as possible. At the same time, you can't predict what the air ahead of you is doing, the air is constantly moving up and down and you may lose more height in the final glide than you think. It would be a disaster to be in the lead 10 km from home only to land just short of the home airfield and lose all speed points.

So you must judge the last climb and glide perfectly. Too much height and you lose time, too little height and you lose the day.

Imagine the scene is, your flight computer is saying you need 1000 feet more for the final glide, this will give you zero margin. You arrive at a 400 feet per minute climb, this is not as good as climbs you had before, but you are thinking "it's late in the day, the sky ahead are not looking so great, this will do.". You take the climb.

You climbed 500 feet and the climb rate drops to 250 feet per minute. This is annoying! You want some margin, say 600 feet, so you still need to climb 1100 feet and at 250 per minute, that's 4.5 minutes. "Oooff", you are thinking, "it was going so well, why can't this bl**dy climb sort itself out..!".

You see other gliders that you were chasing leaving the climb just above you. "Do they have enough?" you wonder, "should I go?". Sometimes you go, find better climbs and win the day, sometime you stay, and lose time, sometimes you stay and win the day because the guys ahead couldn't find anything better and had to slow down, the permutations are endless. All these options and eventualities are constantly spinning around in your head. This is a critical phase of the flight and the adrenalin and emotions are running very high. Yet you have to make a rational choice. Very hard to do.  

Yesterday I cut it down to the wire. I thought I had plenty of height to get home, but didn't account for the increasing head wind as we were getting lower and lower. The last part of the glide was very low over crop fields and I just managed to get in to the airfield.

The results as it happen were very good, won the day and 1-2-3 for the GB team..