Water & McCready setting

In the waiting of proper weather, here is a table that was derived while studying McCready ring value of various sailplane, with various wing loading. It gives you an equivalent additional Mc Cready setting to be representative of polar change due to waterballast.

This is the result of numerical investigation filtered by the "TAR"* method. For sure your marvelous onboard computer knows better...

The objective is to provide simple figures, easy to memorize, per family of glider (Club class/15m/18m/20m/unlimited), to be used with "Standart Mc Cready ring" (like the good old time).


Example : today I fill my LS6 with 80L of water. I should consider increasing by 0.4m/s my McCready setting due this additional wing loading - on top of other setting (80/100*0.5m/s=0.4m/s)

Don't hesitate to use this "enhanced rule of thumb" !

(& keep in mind it is always more efficient to have a McCready setting "a bit too less" than "a bit too much"...)




* "TAR"="That's About Right" method - i.e. there is a certain dose of approximation in all this.

Still in the workshop

This year I am not exactly as early as wished at finishing yearly work on the LS6, already some good day were missed... Now my Pruefer is coming next week, everything should be fine !

 I am getting trained at using my Drift HD camera, interesting fish eye effect in the garage, which seems even more molded around the glider ;-)

French oldies

Not exactly sailplane stuff, nevertheless a few interesting views of french prototypes from the 50's, that I numerized from a VHS owned by Jean-Claude Fayer some years ago.

Rare images for some of them.

Back in 2008, I had the opportunity to organize a cession at ISAE wind tunnel, in frame of a student project. It was concern with the characterisation of a sailplane model, the Jibe 2 from Flybiwo.

If found I had stored some image from this cessions, here they are assembled in a short video.

Pure geek material ;-)

Video footage from past year

Here is a video assembling different flights over past season. Those shots were flown starting either from my "home airfield" of Moissac (LFCX) or from different flying trip : Jaca (LECI), Bailleau (LFFL) & Luchon (LFCB).

Mountain flying + Family

We spent, as a family, a day in Luchon airfield (LFDH), that stands so to speak in the middle of Pyrénées mountains, on french side.

The weather was nice for the kids to play outside, and grass runaway was very welcoming...

For dad, autumn thermal where just right to discover this new area. I was also happy to fly over the slopes I had quite much flown with models.

Friends showed me the way to spain...

The most amazing thing was magical october's light !

Flying Bailleau contest - 2011

Again this year I did participate to Bailleau intl contest, a good compromise between flying & family, with quite a number of other kids.

A lot of glider...

... that stood iddle some time on the ground quite often due to a wet weather for august !

There was still some nice day to fly, overall less extraordinary than the year before...

Some fields were visited again, and again my daughter was so nice to come retrieve me !

Well, not many flight hours logged, but quite a lot chating !!