The above pictures were taken with the phone, which was a pain, since I had to unplug it and take it out of the holder etc...
Found my old little Panasonic Lumix from years ago and it still works, so maybe I'll take some more in-flight pics with it if something interesting comes up.
Here's my instrument panel:
Little red thing at the top is the base of the Yaw String on the outside of the canopy, shows the relative angle of the plane to the apparent wind. The plane is more efficient when aligned.
Below it is the all but useless compass that spins around a lot.
Left is Altimeter, guesses altitude via ambient air pressure, with adjustment for barometric pressure changes with weather, reading 3350 feet
Upper left, Air Speed in mph, A little open ended probe in the nose of the plane is pressurized as you ram through the air, reading 52mph or so.
Upper right, electronic Variometer, showing me I'm going up at about 1.7 knots. This device beeps variably as the plane rises, so you don't have to stare at it. The green light indicates you are rising at a rate higher than you were during the last 20 seconds or so (or falling at a lower rate than over the last 20 seconds).
Lower right, another Variometer, this one mechanical, measures amount of air flowing out of (rising) or into (sinking) a flask with a liter or so of capacity. Measures in feet per minute, and reads about 500 fpm up at the moment. It jumps around a lot.
The little rectangular blue thing is an experiment, an aquarium thermometer, with the probe in the air vent, to see what kind of temperature difference there is between rising air (should be a little warmer) and the air around it. Inconclusive yet, though I think I see .4 to .4 degrees F difference. I thought it might be more.
And on the far right, a cell phone using software that calculates all sorts of selectable goodies using GPS.
Naviter SeeYou Navigator. There are dedicated devices, but expensive, and this is more than enough for now.
The blue arrow is the current location, the color of the trailing line shows rising (yellow and red) or sinking (green and blue) air. This makes it very easy to home in on rising air. Had I not been taking a picture I probably would have circled back to the red area of the track and the bottom of the screen and played that bump.
There's not much detail on the map because I'm over the swamp east of the airport at the moment.
When you circle, the display zooms in on your circle, indicating which parts of the circle gave more or less lift,
From the Left:
It is calculating no wind at the moment, but previously, it was blowing in the direction of the red arrow on the compass rose.
An hour and a minute since takeoff.
Gained 280 feet the last time I gained some. Just flying around.
Moving 55mph over the ground.
Flown 11.8 miles, using some point-to-point straight line calculation - actually 55 miles or so (an hour at that general speed), but it doesn't count circling in lift.
GPS calculates an altitude of 3425 feet. It rarely agrees with the pressure altitude, there is some
conversion possible. Pressure altitude is the standard, it will be wrong (a little), but everyone will likely be equally wrong, so it works.
My "target" is the airport, at a bearing of 82 degrees, only 1.5 miles away, and a glide slope of 3.4 to 1 would put me over the airport at 2102 feet. It would provide more useful information at a greater distance from the airfield. The dashed pink line from the blue position arrow is the direction to the airport (or other target selected).
Currently rising at 150 feet per minute, the three instruments rarely agree on that, since it changes so often,
The previous rise was only 50 feet per minute.
I'm flying in a non-circling path, and since the last circle, the glide ratio was 52 to 1 - drop one foot for 52 feet forward.
Other calculations are available, depending on what you want to see, or for use in navigating through several points on a course.
Here's the airport area looking northwest toward Zephyrhills
"Our" runway is being extended to the lower left for bigger business jet traffic which we hope will not materialize other than for occasional events in town that the Political Person who got the extension authorized and paid for will promote for his well-heeled buddies.
Having bigger business jets and parachutes and gliders mingling isn't the best thing.
Bottom center is
SkyDive City, the more experienced jumpers land there, often swooping in for a landing, and they like to "ski" across the pond to a landing. You screw that up you get soaked.
The less experienced jumpers, due to the runway extension taking some of their space, land in the area above and slightly left of the pond, near the wastewater plant and golf course.
Actually, they land all over the place, especially if it is windy and they misjudge.
Our glider club is to the right, around the larger clump of trees near the runway.
Most of the air traffic uses the runway at the top, as that is where the fuel and hangars and whatever else they have is located. Mostly small planes, with a couple of small jets. There's a gyrocopter manufacturer there, so they do test flights of their mewly built machines. There's a banner towing operation on that side, you you see them pick up the banners and head to the beach in the morning, and come back and drop them in the afternoon.
The dense area top right is a trailer park, of which there are many in the area. There's one we call
the Trailer Park, but it is out of sight to the upper right.
The white thing at the top left is a
water bottling plant. Probably connects to Crystal Springs a couple of miles away and not the sewage plant, but, who knows.
So, 2.6 hours Wednesday, just floating around the airport in a cloudless blue sky.
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Here's a little time lapse showing thermals making clouds:
en.wikipedia.org
