At 07:59 AM 4/11/03 +1030, you wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 07:17:04PM +0930, Leigh Bunting wrote:
>
> > Nope. Its just open slather while staying out of the military airspace.
> > It never ceases to amaze me how many light a/c and helicopters blunder
> > straight over Whitwarta through winch-wire airspace.
>
>I had an interesting experience earlier this year.
>
>Winching at Lochiel. Normal launch height with the wind on the day
>was 2200' indicated; Cloudbase was at... well, about 2200' indicated.
>8 octas -- one of those days with a solid blanket of cloud. We were
>releasing before the top of launch to avoid cloud (you can do that with
>stranded steel cable, but I wouldn't want to do it with solid wire)
>
>Anyway, I was taking one of our recently solo pilots on a daily
>checkflight. Just for something different I put him in the back
>seat of the Puchatek.
>
>So here we were, sailing up the wire towards launch height, when
>suddenly a Cessna just *materialized* in front of us. It was descending
>through cloud; I watched it just "fade-in" in front of us.
>
>My checkflight pilot was looking at the wingtips to judge his climb
>angle from the back seat for the first time, and didn't notice it
>until I simultaneously released, shouted "My aircraft!" and put us
>into a negative-G right turn. The Cessna just plodded along, with
>its flight path directly over the winch, oblivious to our presence
>(not surprising, his view of us would have been obscured by his
>engine cowling)
>
>Was it close? The groundcrew thought it was, and it was close enough
>to warrant discussion around the clubhouse at the end of the day. Think
>about the distance between gliders at opposite sides of a thermal; it was
>kinda like that: close enough to be a concern, and close enough to make
>you think about what would have happened if I hadn't seen it, but not
>close enough to start filling out "incident" forms for the ATSB. The
>fact that the Cessna was descending through cloud in uncontrolled airspace
>might have warranted some kind of report, but I didn't get a good look
>at his rego.
>
>It was close enough to warrant a call on the area frequency to point out
>that glider launching was occurring over that bit of the map marked with
>the "wire launching" symbol, though.
>
>Anyway, my point...? Only that you don't need to be close to military
>airspace to have "issues" with other traffic not looking or caring where
>they're going.
>
> - mark
> [ waiting for Mike B to make some kind of snarky comment about how
> this merely demonstrates the poor standard of training given to
> glider pilots or something ]
You are allowed to be within 1000 feet vertically of cloud when you are
below 3000 feet AMSL or within 1000 feet of the ground but you are required
to have and use radio under these circumstances. I don't know that gliders
are exempt from this.
Mike
Borgelt Instruments - manufacturers of quality soaring instruments
phone Int'l + 61 746 355784
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