All the time since my flight from Ascutney, I wanted to do a cross-country flight. Many hang glider and paraglider pilots fly x-country regularly, and they all rave about the experience. I was definitely getting inspired to cut the cord, to leave the fishbowl.
New pilots were joining the x-country ranks as well, like Ilya Rivkin with his recent 2 flights. I couldn't help it anymore, I needed to fly somewhere. It didn't matter why or where. Just needed a good day to get me high into the sky.
Last Sunday at Tanner-Hiller was that day. I got to the airport around 11am and I couldn't believe how great the sky looked. It was a gold mine. And many people came out to play. I don't think I have ever seen so many pilots at Tanner-Hiller.
I spent some time replacing a downtube on my glider that I have broken a day before at Burke, and I was ready to launch around 1:30PM. But the line to be towed up was pretty long. With only one tug towing, it took me more than an hour to get my glider on a cart and ready to roll.
All Lined Up
Nick was helping on launch and made the process as efficient as possible.
Nick assisting on launch
The tow was pretty uneventful. Normal thermal bumps here and there, but nothing crazy.
Takeoff
In a few minutes I released from the plane. Rhett left me in a nice thermal and I was going up 300' per minute.
Release
It took some time to get high enough to consider leaving some place. I lost a couple of thermals and found other ones, sometimes getting 600 ft/min up, sometimes getting into sink.
Climbing Up!
Climbing up with other pilots around me, made it even more fun experience.
Sharing the Sky. Lift is everywhere!
Finally, I reached 5500' MSL and was probably another 500' from the cloudbase. I decided I had enough altitude to go on a glide with no return. I picked a cloud I liked in the distance, and went for it. Obviously, I didn't picked either a good direction or good cloud, but I was too overwhelmed with the whole thing.... Gotta start somewhere, though. The one thing I was paying attention to was possible fields to land in. I saw some options in the distance I could probably use.
Leaving for another cloud.
My glide wasn't long. Falcon doesn't have a great glide to begin with, and I grossly underestimated how far those clouds were. Very soon I was at approximately 1000' above ground and started picking up landing zones. Some of the options I saw in the distance were unusable. Swamps or something like that. But there were a few field I flew over, so I turned around and went back to those. Huge hay fields. Recently mowed. Couldn't be better.
Hay field - my LZ of the day
On the ground
The landing was pretty good, except I flared a bit too soon. I held the flare and parachuted back to the ground. Then moved the glider to a tree line. A friendly guy from a nearby house came out to greet me. I apologized for landing on his land. He told me, the field wasn't his, but his neighbor's and they probably didn't care either. The guy was just impressed with my landing and wanted to chat. He even offered to relaunch me - "Hey, I've got a truck and a small hill. Can you launch from there?". I thanked him, but declined... He didn't offer to drive me back to the airport though. That would be much more useful.
I called Rhett and asked if he could find someone willing to fetch me. Bob Burchard, manager at Tanner-Hiller, volunteered to bring my truck down. I started packing my glider, and then waited another 40 minutes for my ride to arrive. I only flew 3.5 miles in a straight line, but I took 30 minutes of drive time to get there. Big thanks to Bob for helping me!
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