Tom Stepleton and I went out to Ridge Soaring this weekend.  Saturday was beautiful, but with no lift to be found.  We were the only pilots there, and the bunkhouse seemed eerily silent.  I can’t wait for a good soaring day!  As always, Tom Knauff and Doris Grove were excellent hosts.

I tried a new setup with my GoPro camera.  I used a suction-cup mount I found here.  You can’t tell in the picture, but it is quite a formidable mount.  It was apparently designed to handle 200mph winds.  I was able to get it in a spot where it was minimally annoying and didn’t occlude my vision.  It made some beautiful video with wide panoramas of the fall Pennsylvanian countryside, and also captured the instruments and my stick movements (although the bottom is cut off on Youtube).  This is also good placement for narration, as the mic is very close to my mouth.

I tried a stall with gear down,  full (+10 deg) flaps, and full dive brakes.  The Mini-Nimbus has trailing-edge dive brakes coupled with flaps.  To my surprise, it was reticent to stall in this configuration.  The buffet was very pronounced, but it didn’t want to let go.  It felt like I was trying to stall a docile 2-33 trainer.  Finally at 20kts (?!) indicated airspeed, it would let go straight ahead.  I imagine the large flaps have a lot to do with the slow stall speed.  I also wonder if the dive brakes are diverting air out to the wing tips, effectively reducing their angle of attack and preventing them from stalling.  The large buffet I encountered would suggest that the wing roots (where the brakes are) were fully stalled.

I bounced on the landing.  I had +6 flaps.  I think I should go to +10.  Also, my excuse is that I hit a little divit in the runway and it launched me a little, though I’m not sure that’s really true (the end of the video shows the exterior view captured on Stepleton’s iPhone).  Just got to hold it off longer!