Freaky as flight

Yesterday I went out to the glider field for a flight and the conditions weren't the greatest. The cloud base was at about 800 feet which was easily the lowest that I have ever flow in. We basically towed off the end of the field and were looking for a hole in the clouds to climb into. We got up to 1500 feet and thats about as high as we could get safely. Oh, did I forget to mention that it was raining and the tower was on watch so we were in controlled airspace. It was a good test of my flying ability to be up on that day.

Really the only reason that I went up was to test out a new toy. It is a Compaq Ipaq 3970 with a GPS sleeve running some gliding software called Winpilot. The software functions as a moving map, flight logger, final glide calculator, compass, wind speed calculator, and so much more. People use them for competitions because you program the goals into them and it helps you fly to the goals more effectively. At this point in my gliding I am just using it for data logging and final glide to make sure that I can get back to the field.

I recorded my flight on Sunday and converted it to Google Earth format for your viewing enjoyment. If you don't already have Google Earth installed it is a must have. If you have it installed then click on the following link to view a record of my 11 minute flight. Be sure to angle the camera down so that you can see the profile of the flight. You can also press play on the right and it will do a fly through of my flight. Cool use for technology.

Enjoy: Click to open flight in Google Earth