Useful
Web Links for Soaring:
Alex
Caldwell
Updated
Available
from http://canv.raspmaps.com/SoaringWebLinks.htm
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Flight
Training
The FAA
makes a basic library of information for glider flight training available free
on-line.
The following
is a minimum library that would fulfill the most of the requirements for the
Knowledge portion of the Private glider license.
There are many more publications and glider training syllabi created by
very experienced glider instructors and schools, such as those
by Bob Wander, Russell Holtz, and Tom Knauff available, that you can purchase as
well, but these links can be a core where you can start, and represent
official sources required by the FAA for your license
The FAA “Glider
Flying Handbook”
Information
needed for basic
knowledge for the FAA Private Pilot Written Test. The whole book
Is on-line in .pdf format.
The “
http://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/faa_regulations/
“Part 61”
Certification: Pilots, Flight Instructors, and Ground Instructors (14 CFR Part 61)
“Part 91”
General Operating and Flight Rules (14 CFR Part 91)
The accident reporting requirements of the National Transportation Safety Board
Under
http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title49/49cfr830_main_02.tpl
The
Airman’s Information Manual,
“
The
spelled out in the
sections.
http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/aim/index.htm
Digital Airport/FacilityDirectory. The official
source of information on airports and navaids
including frequencies, runway lengths, airport diagrams and much other info. Some other
online services such as Airnav are
trying to do the same thing, in a user
friendly Web based format, but this is the official source.
http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_products/dafd/
Practical
test standards for Private Pilot Glider
http://www.faa.gov/training_testing/testing/test_standards/media/FAA-S-8081-22.pdf
Sectional
Charts
You must
become familiar with these for your written test and practical test for the Private
Pilot Glider rating. In glider flying, we still generally train with
old-fashioned paper maps. It is useful to have a plotter, which is a plastic
ruler calibrated to the scale of sectional charts, so you can easily measure
off distances and measure compass headings.
Many private glider owners are
equipping their gliders with various
that these are nice, but are more like adjuncts for convenience, AFTER you’ve learned the basics of pilotage and dead reckoning using old-fashioned paper
charts. The
There are
devices coming out that present you with digital sectional charts on an
electronic display IPADs, Iphones,
Android phones and tablets,
re-programmed automobile
The FAA
now provides all sectional,
in a digital format. They also have the entire Aiport/Facility
directory, mentioned above,
which is the real official source of data about individual airports, like
whether fuel, oxygen, a mechanic is available and many other things
you
need to know if you are planning on landing there.
http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_products/
Aircraft
Flight Manual – “POH” Pilot’s Operating Handbook
You need
to have a manufacturer’s Flight Manual for the glider in which you will be
training.
In our club, this will be the Schweizer
2-33. You must become very familiar
with all the flight limitations and
checklists in this manual. Having the flight manual in the glider satisfies that
you have access to the required information by the FAA. Some of these flight limits can be in the
form of placards, such as markings on the airspeed indicator “
balance limitations. You
must be able to calculate a weight and
balance calculation and be prepared to do one before any flight. To
do it right, requires
some
multiplication and some long hand division, to calculate the “moments” and the exact C.G. for your specific
flight considering you and your
passenger’s weight. A digital
calculator is very
good to have if you are not handy with long hand multiplication and
division. The flight manual
does have a graphical way to calculate if you are within limits for a “generic” 2-33 but if you are
very close, it is better calculate out and compute the C.G. the hard way, using the moments.
The
flight manual we have is generic and the weight and empty C.G. of our gliders may be
somewhat different than the generic factory flight manual.
You must have
a current weight and balance computation done by a licensed mechanic
for each glider you fly. Remember, each of
our 2-33’s does not weigh exactly the same, or have the same moments in the
weight and balance computation.
There may have been repairs made, or differences in the type of
equipment installed, such as batteries, oxygen tanks, radios and
other instruments, that can affect the
weight and balance of each individual ship.
You need to get the most recent and current weight and balance for the
specific glider you are flying to be correct in calculating a weight and
balance for a flight.
http://archive.soaravenal.com/sgs233%20manual.pdf
Aviation
Weather Knowledge
Aviation
Weather for Pilot and Operations Personnel AC 00-6A
General knowledge about the atmosphere and weather. Primarily for
Pilots but good background information for basic meteorology. A good read for anyone interested in weather.
Aviation Weather
Services AC 00-45 Rev. G
More
about the actual weather services available to pilots for getting weather
briefings used in planning their flights, rather than general meteorology
information.
Preflight
Weather Information
The Pilot
in Command is responsible before every flight to obtain all pertinent
information pertaining to that flight. Among the most important
Information
is that of Aviation Weather Forecasts.
"Duat" - for an official FAA pre-flight weather
briefing which also includes
additional things, like "TFRs",
and "Notams".
This services is run by Data Transformation Corp. for the FAA. It
constitutes an official
Weather briefing for satisfying FAA regs.
If you
get a student license, you can register and get a username and password:
Duat also collaborates with Seattle Avionics to offer a free flight planning
program called
“Duat Voyager” you can download from the link on the
main DUAT homepage. It is more
for power flying, but would also be helpful for planning a glider flight as
well.
http://www.seattleavionics.com/duatvoyager.aspx
Note:
there is another service run by
Which basically does the same thing as DUAT.
You can register for it free at:
Now,
Lockheed Martin, who administers the 1-800-WXBRIEF telephone weather briefings has a website. Registration is free. It provides a complete computerized weather
briefing similar to DUAT and DUATS.
Airspace
The AOPA
has a very nice article with good diagrams and charts explaining the national airspace
system, and the VFR weather visibility
and cloud clearance minimums for the different classes of airspace. Also they touch on
Commercially
available courses
These are
three popular and
complete courses developed by experienced
and well respected
senior glider instructors
you can purchase:
Tom Knauff
Tom has written several
different courses for Beginners, Transitioning Power Pilots, and Instructors. I have
the Tom Knauff books and have used them in recent
years. His “Glider Basics, First Flight
to Solo” is a classic now, and explains
his “TLAR”, or “That looks about right”
method of pattern and landing judgement, which is one
of the best explanations about how to make accurate patterns and landings,
particularly off – field landings in gliders or power planes, for that matter.
Russell
Holtz
Flight Training Manual for Gliders
Glider Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowlege
He has
some nice check-off forms suitable to print and include in your logbook for
tracking. These may be very useful to
you and your instructor as well for keeping track of an
documenting your progress:
Written
Test Preparation:
http://www.gliderbooks.com/downloads/HandbookRecord.pdf
Flight
Training Progress.
http://www.gliderbooks.com/downloads/ManualRecord.pdf
Paper
Glider glide slope calculator outline:
http://www.gliderbooks.com/downloads/GSRulerTemplate.pdf
Bob
Wander
Several
different courses for beginners, commercial candidates, flight instructor
candidates, Cross Country.
Joy of
Soaring
I will
mention the “Joy of Soaring”, which was the most popular training manual
in the past (like when I was a student glider pilot). It is now out of print. But you can find copies on Amazon. Some people,
notably Tom Knauff, are
now critical of certain things in it,
but it was pretty good for it’s day.
Some of the illustrations are very good for helping
to remember certain concepts, like the effect of the “wind gradient”. The
illustrator, Gil Parcel, was very talented, and in my opinion, has not been surpassed to this day.
http://www.cumulus-soaring.com/books/SSA/JoyOfSoaring.htm
General
Flying Information
___________________________
“Stick
and Rudder: an Explanation of the Art of Flying”
by Wolfgang Langeweische
http://www.amazon.com/Stick-Rudder-Explanation-Art-Flying/dp/0070362408
Written
in the 1940s and still in print, it is a classic book about the practical
fundamentals of handling and flying light aircraft. Full of useful concepts that can make
you a better pilot andsave your life. Very good if you plan to
fly a tailwheel airplane. If one
combined this with the “TLAR” methods of Tom Knauff
in “Glider Basics, First Flight to Solo”,
it would be complete for both power flying and glider flying. These two books have all the stuff you
absolutely have to know. 90% is not good
enough on this fundamental information. Everyone must understand it 100%. If
all pilots did understand all of this information, we would have very few
accidents.
“See How it Flies”
by John S. Denker
Very good book which has been made
available on-line.
The author is an experienced flight instructor who combines the practical aspects of
how to fly with aerodynamic theory that explains WHY things happen the way they do in a practical
manner that is useful to pilots in the cockpit.
Like “Stick and Rudder”, it is full of concepts that if understood and
applied, will make you a better
pilot and even save your life.
Mantaining Currency
Wings
Program – you can get your “
A site
with many resources, allows you to enroll in the FAA Wings Pilot Proficiency
Program.
Record
all your educational activities and required flight instruction on the site.
The most
significant incentive to participating pilots is the added level of safety and
professionalism that is obtained through adoption of a consistent recurrent
training program. Pilots participating in the WINGS program to at least the
Basic Phase need not accomplish the flight review requirements of 14
of flying
that you do and the ratings you have.
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Another newsletter
that is really nice way to keep up with what the FAA wants all pilots
to know, is what they now call the
"FAA Safety Briefing". It used
to be called FAA Aviation News but they recently changed the name. It has tons of
really good information in a magazine like format, and is easy to understand and read. I learned a lot about this new ADS-B system
that is coming in the not too distant future. It will be required by 2020 but
is already starting to be used. It will
add signals that aircraft will send out to broadcast their
http://www.faa.gov/news/safety_briefing/
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GOOD, BUT NOT OFFICIAL
SOURCES OF INFORMATION:
Online
practice for the FAA written
or “knowledge” tests.
I have
not checked all of these in detail. I
tried to include the ones that allow filtering the questions for the glider exam, as opposed to
airplane specific or instrument flying specific
questions. Remember, the
glider written test does have many questions that are not specific
just to gliders, and apply to all
types of flying. But it will not have
things that pertain to such
things as the Airline Transport rating, Instrument flight, multi-engine
flying etc. So you can
pretty safely filter out those kinds of questions from you
practice test taking.
http://www.mywrittenexam.com/mwe/
Gleim has some of the FAA written test questions specific to gliders on their
website, 65
questions for private glider, and 111 questions for commercial glider. You have to register
to create an account. They also have books with all the possible questions
on the exams:
http://www.gleim.com/aviation/naqas/#avTab=
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The
"Forecast Discussions" for getting the "big picture" of
what is happening with the weather. Put in a city name like Avenal, or
city name. These are really good, because they tell you what is expected to
happen with the weather over the next several days and also WHY:
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Another
good site for gathering up aviation weather is
this one. The "Prog" charts are good for
seeing the weather systems,
and they forecast out 12, 24, and 36 hours ahead. It's mostly for power planes, but it gives
you a good idea of the big picture and how it is expected to change in the next
12 to 36 hours.
http://aviationweather.gov/adds/
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This is a weather site that I developed from one that was
online sometime early 2000s
but the developer stopped maintaining
it in 2005.
I replaced the above site with this one. I added some new
features, such
as several
other world-wide areas can be chosen, and several other parameters added to the
GFS and
computer models. It does require JAVASCRIPT
to be enabled in
your browser. It seems to work on the Iphone
and Ipad as well as the Android with
the default browser that comes with the
ATT Android phones.
http://canv.raspmaps.com/coolweather.html
Unisys
has a lot of cool weather information in a nice format. They have all the main
Computer
models available including the NAM/WRF, GFS and GFSx,
ECMWF and the RUC
The GFSx has a multipanel
format or you can animate it using the “loop” selection.
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NexSat from the
Navy
Research Lab in
For
Satellite pictures that are helpful to look at, to go with the Forecast
Discussions, I like to look at this one. I look at either the
"CONUS", which is the lower 48 states, and then select the western US, or the "NE
Pacific" to see weather that is coming in from the Pacific and will hit us
in the next day or so. You can animate the pictures for the past 12 hours and it
looks pretty cool. This one give you the
actual history for the
last 24 hours. Combined with the forecast in the above link, you can get
a good idea of what is happening in the "Big Picture". There are many options, with different
parameters and overlays, such as water vapor, the jet stream, fronts,
pressure patterns etc, etc.
http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/NEXSAT.html
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RASP –
Dr. Jack
After you
get the "Big Picture" of the weather, you can cone in on the more
local "micro" weather picture for soaring near AVENAL with the RASP.
On the RASP, I mostly look at the HCRIT
are where the shearlines are going to be, and the Height of Critical Updraft Strength
HCRIT
I also
like to look at the Skew T soundings for each of the 8 places it shows them
for. That will tell you how high the thermals will go, and whether there will be clouds, and if so, what the cloudbase
will be and where to look for shearlines for
lift. The Skew T also will try to tell
you if there is going to be rain, or high level clouds like cirrus, which
the RASP Blipmaps don't show.
The basic
AVENAL RASP is here:
http://canv.raspmaps.com/RASP/AVENAL/FCST/RASPtable.html
A larger RASP area covering all of CA and NV at 7.2km
resolution. Page has links to many
other useful weather related sites for planning soaring flights and getting
weather briefings, checking TFRs etc.
http://canv.raspmaps.com/RASP/SIERRA/FCST/RASPtable.html
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There is
a Weather Underground station now in Avenal at the elementary
school just South of the Airport along Hwy 33.
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=MAT565
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Of course
the CCSC web cams are good for seeing what's happening at
the airport right now
There is
nothing like the good old-fashioned weather forecasting method of sticking your
head out the door or window. WebCams are modern way of doing this in real time all over
a large region.
There are
a number of other web cams around the state that can be useful for
Getting a real time view of the weather right now.
The Owens Lake DustCams are
Nice, the
Lake Isabella Kern cams are good, There are some
around
Frazier
Park etc.
Webcamsgalore has a large list of webcams by region.
http://www.webcamgalore.com/EN/USA/California/statecam-0.html
http://www.webcamgalore.com/EN/USA/Nevada/statecam-0.html
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"Airnav" is a good site for getting information about a given
airport. Like if you were going to fly over to Paso Robles, you can get all the
runway lengths and directions, the radio frequencies used, the pattern
altitude, the direction of
the pattern for each runway, and other information such as any businesses
on the field, if there is fuel or a mechanic available, even hotels,
motels etc.
The FAA
publishes this stuff in the “Airport Facilities Directory”, but it's not as
nicely presented. But they do put in a disclaimer on these non-FAA
sites that they are
not "official", whereas the FAA's Airport Facility Directory is
Official.
Another
useful thing they have is they give you a phone number you can dial to listen
to the AWOS or ASOS automated weather report for the airport
on your cellphone. It's the same info the broadcast on the radio
for aircraft in flight. It gives you the current temp, dewpoint,
wind, altimeter setting, ceiling and visibility.
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XXXXXX-
note Runwayfinder unfortunately seems to have shut
down in early 2012. It was great.
Skyvector is probably the closest thing to it.
Runwayfinder is good for an on-line sectional chart view, and you can
plot routes between landmarks and calculate distances etc. They also try to plot any TFRs,
but they warn that they are not responsible, so take that with
a grain of salt. Only the actual FAA sites are official for that type of
info. They also give you the latest "METAR" weather observations for
all the airports
that have them:
XXXXXX
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Skyvector is very much like Runwayfinder
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A new one
I recently became aware of that seems to work and has a nice user interface.
Has links
to airport diagrams and airport info from the Airnav
site also:
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Flightaware shows you
the routes where the airliners and business jets and other
traffic that is
either IFR or VFR on flight following flies, so it's useful if you
plan on flying near a large airport, to
get an idea where to expect the traffic will most likely be. You can also
get airport diagrams, and
even look at all the possible IFR approaches and departures for the airport.
Knowing these
approach and departure paths is very helpful to the glider pilot,
mainly in trying to avoid them or at
a minimum, realizing that hypervigilance is
necessary when near these areas.
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There are
a bunch of other sites that are trying to show tracking of
air traffic using GoogleEarth, but they seem to
come and go, but that would
be a good way to learn about where the air line and business aircraft
traffic flies in an out of larger airports. Like we were
discussing, those
guys tend to fly on "track"s in the air, so if you learn where those
tracks
are, you can do better at avoiding them in a glider if you are flying
closer
to larger airports. One I heard
about but haven't tried is. I think it needs
"GoogleEarth" to see the
traffice in 3D.
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Chartgeek.com
is a cool site that lets you overlay current Sectional Aviation charts
in GoogleEarth. You can also overlay the current
“Special Use Airspace” and visualize
the airspace, such as Class B, Class C, Class D, restricted and prohibited
areas, etc. in 3D inside GoogleEarth.
XXXXX –
as of
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LEARNING
ABOUT WEATHER
Understanding
the Sky
An online
book by Dennis Pagen written for sailplane pilots,
hang glider pilots, RC glider
pilots. Pretty nice.
http://blog.rodbailey.com/uploads/DennisPagen-UnderstandingTheSky.pdf
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Weatherpredictor Site
Meteorologist
Jeff Haby of
http://www.weatherpredictor.com
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ANALYSING
FLIGHTS
It can be
very helpful to study the flights of other good pilots when planning your own
cross-country flights. The OnlineContest allows you to download the “
http://www.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/daily.html
You can then visualize the flight path inside GoogleEarth in 3-D.
There is a program called “IGCReplay” that
works with GoogleEarth. This allows you to analyse and replay in 3-D an “
There are other commercial viewers for
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A lot of soaring clubs around the country have useful
training information that they have developed for their clubs that can be
useful to us as well.
GENERAL INTEREST
Soaring Café
An online general interest magazine about what’s going on in
gliding, especially racing.
SUPPLIES
Cumulus Soaring
Paul Remde
Soaring Supplies. Occaisionally
puts out a very educational newsletter.
Very knowledgeable about gliding computers,
http://www.cumulus-soaring.com
Wings and Wheels
Soaring Supplies and Parts for some gliders, especially
brakes. Very knowledgeable resource.
W&W is also the most popular place for on-line ads for
gliders for sale.
Knauff and Grove
Ridge Soaring of
Tom Knauff and Doris Grove –
leading soaring school owners and instructors.
Good source for training books and some general soaring
supplies.
Soaring Society of
Books and Supplies
Services to SSA members