Hello, greetings from UK :)

Hello Jason,

Welcome to the IPACS forums! Thank you for sharing your experience with the upgrade from AFPD to aerofly RC 7.

Thats what the simulator is best at. Crash, retry, crash, retry until you are capable of controlling even the most advanced maneuvers. And rebuilding the aircraft is as simple as waiting 3 seconds or hitting the space bar.

Even after about 5 years flying in this simulator it never gets boring flying online in the multiplayer. If Jason is your online name then we already met online, haven't we?

How long are you flying real RC aircraft now?

Cheers,
Jan

Hi Jason,

I flew RC for about 3 or 4 years or so but I moved on to full scale gliders where I can actually see the world from above myself. From the beginning on I used simulators to help me on my way to become an rc pilot and also full scale pilot. Starting with the FMS and then AFPD I eventually got aerofly 5 and later the FS and RC 7. Currently I only fly RC in simulators and no RC in the real world - just real life gliding. Recently a friend of mine let me fly his discus launch glider and flying it was going very smooth because of all my training. The real thing actually behaved exactly like the Stobel V2 I made for the aerofly 5 and RC 7 and it was a lot of fun to fly again.

But I don't like the risk of crashing that permanently exists in RC and having to repair my aircraft; I really am a pilot not a builder. And when I build I tend to want to make it perfect so that it is light weight and never breaks but I never finish it, because I never leave the planning phase Also it costs a lot of money, flying RC is not that much cheaper than flying big gliders if you tend to expand your fleet each year.

The thing I love the most about flying is the moment before you touch down. And that moment is pretty short in RC and also quite rare, doing touch and goes is a bit more riski with small rc planes. But seeing the ground approaching from the pilots perspective and then flying an almost perfect arc towards the ground, I just love that. Continious increasing elevator deflection until you are down. Using the simulator I perfected the flaring to almost kiss the ground every time. If you can hear the grass stroking on the tail wheel of the glider, then hear it spin up before it actually touches the ground together with the main gear with a little bump (because the grass surface is bumpy ) - thats what I call a perfect landing. And I had dozens of those this year and I just love that feeling - I just nailed it! And you don't get there without extensive training I'm flying gliders for 8 years now - won two competitions in a row where you needed to spot-land the glider in a good looking fashion. You needed to touch down the tail wheel in a 5m long area next to the judges, whilst flying about 70km/h (19.4m/s). So you only have a 0.26s time window to precisely touch down - I hit that 3/3 times in the first competition and 1/3 times in the second . Second approach was way steeper than usual, only few pilots ever touched down in the 30m long area even - hehe. Even with full airbrakes it was impossible to force down the glider without touching main wheel first, so you actually needed to slow down even before entering the final approach - without beeing to slow for the judges to notice of course hahaha
Too bad I am not allowed to partition again, I have my pilots license for too long now, giving me an unfair advantage.

In the multiplayer you will most likely see me doing touch and goes just to train exactly that. About 500 hours on aerofly simulator in the last 3 years also helps, I guess - hehe
Even flying for only 15 minutes a day really adds up over time.

Cheers,
Jan

Hi Jason,

yes and its a lot about tactics. You can fly faster and probably get to the next thermal sooner, but you loose more altitude that way. If the thermals are strong you are up faster in the same location as someone who flew slower but entered the thermal higher. If you fly too fast however you lose all your altitude before reaching the thermal.

Also you are very very slow if you take every single thermal there is, at least for the big gliders. One thermal might only have 1m/s updraft, but if I can get 3m/s elsewhere, I better wait for the next thermal. So you fly through several thermals before you find a strong one. But what if you never find it? Its all about taking the risk and betting on a better thermal. At some point you will either have to take a weak thermal and very very slowly make your way back up to the top or you are landing somewhere that is not your home airfield. Either a field or another airfield which gives you the possibility to restart, most likely.

But thermals aren't the only type of updraft there is. On slopes the wind is forced over the mountain, so on the windward side there is usually a large area of lift, sometimes coupled with thermals if the sun shines onto the hill side.

And then there are the mountain waves. Those are gigantic vertical movements of air behind large mountain ranges. They reach up to altitudes where airliners typically cruise at and even beyond. World record in altitude is 15,460 meters (50,727 feet) and world record in distance flown in one day is a little more than 3000km (1618NM) both records done using mountain waves. Some of these waves only give you laminar +0.5m/s others go above what your vertical speed indicator can show (+5m/s ~ 1000ft/min). The greatest one, I've ever encountered was 4.3m/s (846 ft/min) at max and it took us all the way to 6000m (FL195) which is the limit you are allowed to fly in the alps. The nice thing about these updrafts is that you feel nothing. Its totally laminar airflow in the updraft but the wind up there is moving you very quickly with about 40-80km/h (22-43kt) (don't quote me on that haha).

Regards,
Jan