randylervold
moderator
(Long post made for entertainment value only, move on if you're looking for a tech tip or empirical data, this isn't it.)
I'm sure most of you know the experience of winter daydreaming about RV flights you're going to take once the weather improves, right? Well, today on a whim I realized one of the recurring fastasies I've had for several years now. It involves trying something a bit weird with an RV so I thought a few of you might find this interesting....
Here's the fantasy: take a day with nothing else to do, fly east up the Columbia River gorge from my home airport (VUO) to the Hood River Airport (4S2), and try to do some ridge soaring in my RV. Sounds nuts but let me explain. I've flown gliders off and on since '92 and even owned a sailpane for a while. I LOVE soaring, but RVs are just a more accessable and practical form of aviation so I'm inactive in soaring now. Hood River is a neat local soaring area that has a ridge to East with a prevailing west wind. The ridge is about three miles from the airport so the standard procedure is to take a tow in a your glider from the airport and release near the ridge. Some days you can fly the ridge lift all day, and on others you can work the ridge to climb up the NE side of Mt.Hood and if you're lucky, and the high altitude wave is cooking, you can get up into it and do some serious wave soaring. There's even an ATC "wave window" that can be opened to keep you clear of the airliner traffic while you're surfing the wave at 20k', but I digress.
My recurring fantasy is to take my RV up to the ridge, set the power for neutral lift, and see if I can stay aloft in the ridge lift by just flying around back and forth like you would in a glider. This morning I was returning from breakfast in Bend, Oregon and happenend to fly right over the Hood River area. I had nothing pressing to do so I dropped down to check the ridge. Sure enough, my EFIS told me there was about a 20 mph West wind blowing. Perfect, let's give this a try! I slowed down and set power to 10" of MAP and 1900 rpm. Just by feel this seemed to be a setting that in no wind would allow me to just barely maintain altitude at a best-glide speed. I set about 10 degrees of flaps and started across the ridge face at 90-100 mph (my RV-3B tail really starts sagging at speeds below about 105 without that 10 degrees of flaps). My VSI is way to slow to function as a variometer like you'd have in a glider so I just used seat of the pants feel to tell when I was climbing or not. As I started across the ridge face I could see myself climbing, cool! I flew close to the ridge imitating a glider and felt more lift in some areas then others and confirmed that the VSI was hopelessly behind. Then, just as in real ridge soaring, I turned away from the ridge to reverse course and fly back up the ridge face. Whoa, huge sink during the turn! Those long skinny high aspect ratio glider wings turn without bleeding off much airspeed or altitude at all. NOT so with the short fat RV wings. So I lost a bunch of altitude on the turn and tucked back into the ridge to try to gain it back. By working very close to the ridge I managed to gett back a little but not all of it and had to add just a bit of power to go along with the lift to get back up the ridge face. After two or three more attempts at turning I found I could work the ridge to gain or maintain lift, but the turnaround really screwed things up.
Having soared this ridge in my glider I was able to compare the experience. As sensitive as my RV-3 is on the stick (most who have flown RV-3s say it is considerably more sensitive than a normal-sized RV), it is does not provide nearly the "feel" that a glider does.
Darn, I was hoping this would be a fun thing to do, turns out it's really not that neat. Oh well, at least I finally got to try it. Now I'll have to dream up a new RV flight fantasy for this winter.
There are some great places along the West coast where the ocean wind hits ridges on the coast and you can soar all day. One of you West coast RVers should try this and see how you do, maybe we can compare notes on technique.
I'm sure most of you know the experience of winter daydreaming about RV flights you're going to take once the weather improves, right? Well, today on a whim I realized one of the recurring fastasies I've had for several years now. It involves trying something a bit weird with an RV so I thought a few of you might find this interesting....
Here's the fantasy: take a day with nothing else to do, fly east up the Columbia River gorge from my home airport (VUO) to the Hood River Airport (4S2), and try to do some ridge soaring in my RV. Sounds nuts but let me explain. I've flown gliders off and on since '92 and even owned a sailpane for a while. I LOVE soaring, but RVs are just a more accessable and practical form of aviation so I'm inactive in soaring now. Hood River is a neat local soaring area that has a ridge to East with a prevailing west wind. The ridge is about three miles from the airport so the standard procedure is to take a tow in a your glider from the airport and release near the ridge. Some days you can fly the ridge lift all day, and on others you can work the ridge to climb up the NE side of Mt.Hood and if you're lucky, and the high altitude wave is cooking, you can get up into it and do some serious wave soaring. There's even an ATC "wave window" that can be opened to keep you clear of the airliner traffic while you're surfing the wave at 20k', but I digress.
My recurring fantasy is to take my RV up to the ridge, set the power for neutral lift, and see if I can stay aloft in the ridge lift by just flying around back and forth like you would in a glider. This morning I was returning from breakfast in Bend, Oregon and happenend to fly right over the Hood River area. I had nothing pressing to do so I dropped down to check the ridge. Sure enough, my EFIS told me there was about a 20 mph West wind blowing. Perfect, let's give this a try! I slowed down and set power to 10" of MAP and 1900 rpm. Just by feel this seemed to be a setting that in no wind would allow me to just barely maintain altitude at a best-glide speed. I set about 10 degrees of flaps and started across the ridge face at 90-100 mph (my RV-3B tail really starts sagging at speeds below about 105 without that 10 degrees of flaps). My VSI is way to slow to function as a variometer like you'd have in a glider so I just used seat of the pants feel to tell when I was climbing or not. As I started across the ridge face I could see myself climbing, cool! I flew close to the ridge imitating a glider and felt more lift in some areas then others and confirmed that the VSI was hopelessly behind. Then, just as in real ridge soaring, I turned away from the ridge to reverse course and fly back up the ridge face. Whoa, huge sink during the turn! Those long skinny high aspect ratio glider wings turn without bleeding off much airspeed or altitude at all. NOT so with the short fat RV wings. So I lost a bunch of altitude on the turn and tucked back into the ridge to try to gain it back. By working very close to the ridge I managed to gett back a little but not all of it and had to add just a bit of power to go along with the lift to get back up the ridge face. After two or three more attempts at turning I found I could work the ridge to gain or maintain lift, but the turnaround really screwed things up.
Having soared this ridge in my glider I was able to compare the experience. As sensitive as my RV-3 is on the stick (most who have flown RV-3s say it is considerably more sensitive than a normal-sized RV), it is does not provide nearly the "feel" that a glider does.
Darn, I was hoping this would be a fun thing to do, turns out it's really not that neat. Oh well, at least I finally got to try it. Now I'll have to dream up a new RV flight fantasy for this winter.
There are some great places along the West coast where the ocean wind hits ridges on the coast and you can soar all day. One of you West coast RVers should try this and see how you do, maybe we can compare notes on technique.
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