A week in Pyrénées mountains

Again this year a very nice week flying from Santa Cilia de Jaca (Aragon)

Not so far away from the airfield, in France, Pic du midi d'Ossau is a nice sightseeing area.

Everyday so to speak, we were gliding along Canon de Ordessa, south of the famous brèche de Roland.

This area being a nature sanctuary, it was not to be flown directly over. Anyway prey bird such as Vultues, Percnoptère & Gypaètes were flying also outside of the parks ;-)

Sometime cloud where growing a bit too much...

... so that we went sight seing in Navarre.

Several time we flew close to each other for the sake of taking nice photo.

In the "wavelet" the view was all the most stunning.

In return I was taken some nice shots too.

Very nice week, and nice collection of images to be remember during cold winters !

Tracking from Jaca

During this week in Santa Cilia, I will be carrying my Spot tracker.
You may follow were I am flying almost live !

See the Spot tracking page.

LS6 winglet project

It has now been a long thought project : adding up my own winglets to LS6a "AD".

The story of the design and corresponding detailed aerodynamic analysis has been presented during XXXth OSTIV congress in Szeged (August 2010).

Here is the presentation.

Summary :

• This winglet design has converged, using reasonnably simple method and pragmatic considerations
• A CAD model, compatible with milling constraints, has been created by Flybiwo
• A set of Navier stockes computation has been performed using TAU code (DLR)

It is now a matter of actually building and flying those winglet :-)

For different reasons (including funding...) the materialisation of those winglet is stalled for now. If you show an interest to it, don't hesitate to contact me !

matthieu.scherrer 'at' free.fr

LS6, a twin seater ?

I plan to apply for a STC to use the LS6 as a twin seater...

;-)

More seriously, the family is now larger, will it be compatible with flying ?

Flying in Spain - 2010 video

Some nice souvenirs of wave & thermic flying from Santa Cilia de Jaca in Spain.

Jaca in 2010

00:24 : "pic du midi d'Ossau", from Canfranc
00:55 : Monte perdido & Gavarnie
01:50 : Posets
02:13 : Vignemale's spanish side

Flying Bailleau Contest

This year, I did participate to the 36th Bailleau contest, starting just south of Paris.
The nice thing : it was also a family time, as the airfield is nice and welcoming for children. Then mental preparation was really nice :)

Flying condition were quite incredibly good, with heigh ceiling, and 8 flight days out of 10. I flew the "long flight" category, and indeed we were launched on big tasks (twice 600km-ish circuits...). The objective for me was to progress, and I have indeed exceeded my longest flights, in term of distance as of duration. I also flew 490km at a mean speed of 107km/h, something I had never done before.
The difficulty was not to hit the airspaces that are everywhere in this region...

I also dicovered outlandings in real nice conditions, fields being generally biger then any airfield...

Thanks to all the crews that retrieved me (4 times...) in the fields. I even once had the visit of my daughter.

This was really a nice contest, a lot of km & experience gained, I wish I'll be back next year !

Jaca in 2010

This year was again the occasion to fly from Jaca with some colleague from different clubs in SW of france.

There was some OTAN manouevers in the mountain, so that it was possible to spot nice helicopters just near the airfield (and then they were on the tops of the moutians...)




Beginning of the week north wind was quite strong, leading to wave conditions on the south side of the Pyrénées. Wind was perfectly perpendicular to the runaway, reaching 25kts at the time of landing !


After quite an energetic aerotowing, everything was much calmer in altitude... even with 120 to 150kph wind to deal with !


Thanks to my brand new oxygen system, I did'nt have to stop climbing so that I could reach more than 6000m ! First time for me (some colleagues even reached higher altitudes).


Being up there just felt like flying an Airbus sometime...


On the 1rst day France was fully covered with cloud, on the 2nd more nice mountains were visible, such as the Pic du midi d'Ossau :


Afterwards, the weather turns to more classical thermal condition, very enjoyable.
I have discovered new areas again this year : Posets, Aygestortes, and also the very nice Vignemale. Some films where taken, to be processed !!

Flying as a ground has made possible nice airshots (thanks Sandrine !) :



At the end quite some kilometers mainly in the mountain for me...


All this with a nice team !