To the officers and members of the Utah Soaring Association:

This letter is in response to Parke's thoughtful and provocative president's farewell in [his] last club newsletter. If any of you missed that letter, I suggest you find it and give it a read. It contains several ideas and suggestions, and some conjecture, that everyone in the club should be aware of. Parke is looking to the future, which is something we should definitely be doing as a group.

For now, I'd just like to address the issue of refinishing the Grob, the costs involved, and options for paying those costs. Our Grob is an excellent piece of equipment and it deserves to be well maintained; so I believe there will be no argument within the club when refinishing is necessary. Parke gives a cost range of $17,000 to $20,000 for this work. At first look those numbers can be startling. But we all know that refinishing is expensive, and with the size of the Grob those numbers are probably about right.

Parke's suggestion for paying this large sum is to institute an hourly glider fee. I'm sure every member realizes that such a fee would mean a major philosophical change in the way our club has always been run. I believe the current fee structure is one of the best aspects of the Utah Soaring Association, and I believe it is in the best long-term interest of our club to resist adding new fees.

Whether or not we can avoid new fees depends on our vision for the future of the USA. Ultimately, if our club is to evolve, perhaps with more gliders and a tow plane, we may need to institute new fees. But I don't believe that paying for a professional refinish of the Grob is the place where such fees should start. I believe it's possible for us to do the refinish ourselves, saving thousands of dollars, and at the same time increasing member involvement in the maintenance of our fleet.

But such a refinish is a huge, technically demanding job * how can we pull it off? We can pull it off because refinishing is primarily sanding and painting. If we were refinishing a racing ship it would be necessary to re-profile the wings, which is the trickiest operation; but since the Grob has a non-critical airfoil, I understand that template profiling will not be necessary. So the biggest part of the job is removing the gelcoat. This must be done in a careful, systematic way, but we can do it. And the sooner we do it the less the gelcoat cracks will propagate into the glass.

What about painting? If it weren't for what I've learned putting the finish on my Spirit kit, I wouldn't be making this proposal. What I've learned is that the new water-borne urethanes are very easy to work with, and that we can do a professional quality job if we supply the elbow grease. I have all the necessary equipment, I can get a 20% discount on PolyFiber's Top Gloss urethane system, and I volunteer to do the spraying. I don't make this commitment lightly. I've been working on my Spirit for over six years and I plan on flying it this summer. The thought of taking on another project so soon makes me queasy, but I believe it's the right thing to do. [Feel free to drop by and see my Spirit if you'd like to get an idea of the kind of results that can be achieved by a rank amateur like me.]

The last concern is verifying the mass-balance of the control surfaces and the final signoff. It should be possible to hire Wayne Wilkensen to assist in this, or perhaps someone in our club has this expertise.

I estimate the total cost of doing the job ourselves would be around $3000 * about $1500 for the urethane paint and primer, $500 for the huge pile of sandpaper that will be required, and $500 for Wayne's signoff (all guesses at this point). If we have to rent a work space, that would be additional.

The real question is whether, as a club, we are willing to commit to such a project. Are we the kind of club that wishes only to fly and prefers to pay someone else to make that possible, or are we willing to get involved at a deeper level? All the good work that was done by club members on repainting the 2-33 (which I confess did not include me) shows that there is a will to work. But most of the club work is done by a relatively small group of dedicated members. Refinishing the Grob will require a club-wide commitment. My feeling is that most of you would rather contribute 20 hours of work over a winter than spend the price of a glider on a refinish and pay for it with hourly glider fees.

This is a great opportunity for us to save a lot of money, but maybe just as important is the opportunity for each of us to become more involved as club members and at the same time increase our personal investment in our equipment and in soaring. Believe me, you will look at the Grob in a new light if you help give it a beautiful finish.

Jeff Knell

Last season I bought a Garmin III+ GPS and flew with it a few times. This winter I’ve begun to play around with the track-log feature and to experiment with some mapping programs on my PC that might make this tool even more useful and fun as I stretch my playground beyond The Pines.

I thought my experience with this hand held and some topographic mapping software might be of interest to our members who have yet to play with one of these gadgets.

The Garmin III+ is a differential-ready 12 channel receiver that costs approximately $350. A backlit 2.2” x 1.5” screen displays a built-in map including towns, roads, lakes, rivers and railroads using a map scale of 500 feet to 3,000 miles. Its memory can store a total of 500 waypoints each with a name, symbol, and comment. It can also store a track-log of up to 1900 points.

You can also download a more detailed map to the unit so that it knows about practically every rut, road or highway in the US.

Before a flight I screw the unit into a swiveling cradle that Garmin sells for about $20. I’ve epoxied this cradle to the bottom of a small aviation kneeboard (another $20) which is then strapped to my upper left leg. With this setup I can easily glance at the data on the screen or look up notes that I’ve pinched in the clip at the top of the kneeboard. The package is pretty small and doesn’t get in the way of the controls.

While in flight the GPS constantly displays a map of the area, the distance back to the airport (or any other waypoint), my ground-speed, and my bearing. I rarely fiddle with it while flying.

The first and most important way in which I use this information is to simplify the “can I go any further and glide back without much pucker” question. To make it really simple I’ve printed the quick look-up table below and clipped it to the kneeboard. The values in red are distances in miles. Those in black are “safe altitudes”, assuming I can achieve a three mile glide per thousand feet (approximately 16:1), and assuming a pattern entry altitude of 7000 feet.

3-8000 9-10000 15-12000 21-14000 27-16000

4-8340 10-10340 16-12340 22-14340 28-16340

5-8670 11-10670 17-12670 23-14670 29-16670

6-9000 12-11000 18-13000 24-15000 30-17000

7-9340 13-11340 19-13340 25-15340 31-17340

8-9670 14-11670 20-13670 26-15670 32-17670

To my essentially conservative nature, this information alone is worth the price of admission.

Another handy piece of information is the ground-speed, which is displayed right next to the waypoint distance discussed. Let’s say I’m headed toward Kamas from Heber and the ground-speed display indicates 95 mph. I’m pretty high so it’s hard to really gauge this using just my senses. Now I decide to turn around, and I notice the ground speed drops to 35mph! Oops. If I’ve kept my airspeed constant, I’ll know I’ve got to contend with a pretty good headwind running back.

The last and least used displays are the bearing and directional arrow. The bearing is a compass value from 0 to 359. The directional arrow always points “home” (or to any other waypoint you’ve chosen). Cool, huh?

All of the discussion previously assumed I had set a waypoint at the Heber airport so that the distance display and the little arrow have something to calculate against. You can enter up to 500 of these waypoints complete with cute icons on the map.

This spring I’ll drive around the Kamas valley scoping possible outlanding fields, which I’ll then set as waypoints in the GPS with a little sailplane icon. Hey, you never know!

And finally the most geeky function of this aviation toy…

While I’m flying, the GPS can continuously record my position in a track-log of up to 1900 points. Later I can retrieve this long list of points using some simple PC software and store them in a file on my hard disk or floppy. One of the cool things to do with such a list is to display each point on a digital topographic map such as Garmin’s United States Topo (for $130), All Topo by iGage (for $119), or DeLorme's 3-D TopoQuads (for $100).

Bring up one of these beautiful topographic maps on your PC and then overlay your track-log and what you get is a really accurate record of your flight. Every thermaling circle is recorded. You can even see the elongations caused by high winds. What a great way to look back on a season!

Greetings again from the Maintenance Guy. This month I thought I’d get everyone thinking about Canopies. Not what covers the back porch but that piece of expensive Plexiglas that keeps our eyes from watering when we’re up playing bird.

How do you spell Canopy?

Here are some of my ideas:

C Cleaning. A good practice before your flight is to clean the windscreen. Besides being able to see, it might make the sailplane that much more aerodynamic (probably would have to be covered with two inches of mud to really make a difference but it sounds good). Dave, from Soar Utah, has always let us use some clean rags and window- spray he keeps in the golf cart. Thanks Dave!

A Ands Off. A good brief item for your passengers is to let them know not to touch the canopy. This includes with their hands, feet (you never know), and especially those long lensed cameras that could really put a scratch in it.

N Never depart with an unlatched canopy. Mr. Schweitzer, Mr. Grob and all the other aircraft manufacturers put checklists in our craft for good reasons. By using the checklist, you will ensure that a positive check has been completed before the foot wiggle is done.

O Opening the canopy is a learned skill. Make sure you use the proper technique so as not to put undo stress on the canopy or your credit card in the event a small (big) boo boo happens.

P The second letter in open. Did I talk about this already?

Y Yearn to keep your scan going through that clean, latched, properly opened and closed canopy when you are out having fun in the super sport we call Soaring!!!!!

Glider Fun Fact: The “Father of Gliding” is a German man named Otto Lilienthal, born in 1848. He is know for being the first man to bring gliding to the public. This inspired many more to build machines in other parts of the world. His favorite maxim was: “ To conceive a flying machine is nothing; to construct one is little; to fly is everything.

Think Lift!

I’ve been lucky so far with a lot of good newsletter fodder coming in. And I’d like to keep it up! So send me your pictures and stories/articles.