| Flight details: | This very mini XC was something of an accident in that my flight plan was to gain as much height as possible while trying to find and map out thermals. It was not really a very long flight but I did get my best ATO of 900ft+ for the Dyke which was an achievement in itself.
The baby XC was the result of me taking to heart some good advice from Mr Massie with regards to flying in zero's.
I guess ATO at this time was around 800-900ft but since I was going neither up nor down I decided to concentrate on working the little lift I was in and put terra-firma out of my mind for as long as possible. This, I actually found quite hard because those negative thoughts were telling me this wasn't going to last long and the terrain was unfamiliar (with regards to landing).
All of these thoughts were detracting from what I should have been doing which was to work this limited lift and see where it may take me.
Eventually, my toys told me the zero's were gone and I was clearly going down so I really had to think about landing options so looking around, I opted for a very gentle slope into wind and setup a nice wide hook that should put me into wind without any radical turns and there endeth my XC.
This was my perception of the flight at the time but when I looked at my trace on returning to the Dyke after a nice leasurely walk back, it appears to me that for whatever reason, I simply stopped thermalling and went on a death glide. I can only assume that at some point, my vario showed me to be in some real sink so I committed to ending the flight there without really trying to push on and find the lift again or another source. I did find a little bit something but it didn't seem worth the effort and you can see this in the tracklog.
My view is there's a moral to this flight with regards to state-of-mind; believe you can do it and you probably will and even if you don't, you'll cover a greater distance than if your constantly thinking about landing. It's a bit like thos |
