My sister got married last weekend, so I decided to come early and do some paragliding.
The Saleve is a nice flying spot outside of Swiss Geneva, on the french side. There are four starting areas, and at least three landing areas.
Access to the Saleve is povided by a cable car service, for paragliders it will cost you around 5 bucks.
Right at the top, where the cable car ends, theres take off area #1. A short and sweet take off, with a crop of rocks off to the left. The problem here is mostly the wind direction, as soon as you leave the immidiate start area, there can be side winds...a second wind flag shows wind speed and direction a bit further out from the cropping.
For this starting area, there are two possible landing sites, #1 landing is pretty advanced,located in france, off to the left of the lower cable-car station there is about a 100 m long strip faceing N-S, no wind flag available, however closest to the cable car for reruns.
Landing area #2, on the swiss side, belongs to a local flight school. Very nice landing, two wind flags, and area to support landing from N-E-S-W. The field is divided into two sections for andvanced and beginner pilots. The down side to this landing area = a 10chf landing fee. It is however the closest to public transport to get you back to Geneva.
Starting area #2 is a 15-20 min hike up the ridge. With a short static start you should be in the air, be carefull of this area, it has the most soaring accidents and tree landings due to the irregular shapes of the rock face below and a large indent in rock croppings off to the left (creates a twister like thermic). Landing areas as depicted above.
Starting area #3 can be accesed either by a shuttle service driving up or by taking a @ hour and 1/2 hike. but the conditions here are beautiful. With a wide starting area, a really stable nce updrafts, many a pilot will use the starting area as a soar point. The slowly curving face below acts as a stabiliser for updrafts.
Landing area for #3 is directly below it, on the french side, it allows for a W-E landing, again, no wind flag with high trees blocking your aproche. Also a very dangerous aspect about this landing area is that it is right under a an updraft which creates bad turbulences. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THIS LANDING AREA, and is possible (with >800m asl) land at the school landing area. You will not be able to see it from the area above and have to go furthur out into the open (away from the updrafts(loose hight)) to be able to spot it. Its on the far right of starting area #3
I learned the hard way, and almost broke some bones on that landing, when the wind just gave out and I droped about 5 m. I survived with a few bruises ;)...painful never the less.
I recomend the Saleve for pretty much beginner pilots such as myself as it has a very stable updraft with no real thermic turbulences. But be carefull about where you land.
Cheers
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
AiREA Shape Large
Today, we had some nice steady wind out in the flatlands behind the train station. I knew there was a front moving in, actually very dangerous conditions to play with a wing. But seeing that I hadnt really had the chance to test this wing before trading it in for something a bit more in my class...I did some research.
These are the specs.
When I bought the wing, I was under the impression that it was a 1-2 class wing. I was wrong, after studing the specs page, I found the wing to be closer to a "b-c" or 2/2-3 wing.
Definition of a class 2 wing :
"Paragliders with demanding flying characteristics and potentially dynamic reactions to turbulence and pilot errors. Recommended for regularly flying pilots."
The Shape Large is classified as a 2 however its also classed as a cross wing.
Here is a nice class comparison.
I figured, "I should wear a helmet for this test".
I found the wing to be quite agile in comparison to the DHV tests, which described the wing, in particular scenarios as average. It apperantly has a tendancy to over-shoot its position above me. Maybe this was just because I am used to a slower wing (bodygaurd), that reacted better to a low pull impulse. I also fully appreciated the way this wing, unlike other 1/a wings I have flown, responded to wight distrobution on the seatboard, allowing for very nice controll using weight translation. My harness (advance success) is pretty beginner, with a high connection point, to dampen any over zealous weight distrobution by noobs such as myself.
I found the experiance on a whole, to be nice, something that I would actually think about taking skywards, sometime in my future flights. I would compare this wings groundhandling action to something similar to a paratech p12, one size too small or a tad over the weight spec (with ultimate area loadage).
Anyway, before anyone starts to think Im an expert...which I am most definitly not...I have to show you a reason why I decided to call it a day. Remeber, I am crazy. This is not the first time I have done something as crazy as this...and its deffinitly not the crazyest thing I have done to date.
Originaly, I thought that the front would pass me by heading over the Rhein and on towards Karlsruhe. effectivly leaving a nice somewhat usable path of stable wind to wing on....I had my eye on the front moving in. Someone stoped in their car and actually got out and asked me if everything was okay. It was at this point in time that I actually figured that I should call it a day. None too soon, I pulled all the lines together and shot this picture.
I managed to grab my gear just as the wind started to really pick up. I assume that there were windspeeds of up 50 or so kmh, and that, just as I started to head towards a nearby underpass to foldup the wing.
What I learned today is I really really really need better schooling in meteorology. I thought I had correctly assesed the situation, I guess not, and nature is not to be underestimated.
Im lucky to have gotten away with my life.... again..... this is seriously the last time I do something this crazy....I hope. ;)
Cheers and good flight.
These are the specs.
When I bought the wing, I was under the impression that it was a 1-2 class wing. I was wrong, after studing the specs page, I found the wing to be closer to a "b-c" or 2/2-3 wing.
Definition of a class 2 wing :
"Paragliders with demanding flying characteristics and potentially dynamic reactions to turbulence and pilot errors. Recommended for regularly flying pilots."
The Shape Large is classified as a 2 however its also classed as a cross wing.
Here is a nice class comparison.
I figured, "I should wear a helmet for this test".
I found the wing to be quite agile in comparison to the DHV tests, which described the wing, in particular scenarios as average. It apperantly has a tendancy to over-shoot its position above me. Maybe this was just because I am used to a slower wing (bodygaurd), that reacted better to a low pull impulse. I also fully appreciated the way this wing, unlike other 1/a wings I have flown, responded to wight distrobution on the seatboard, allowing for very nice controll using weight translation. My harness (advance success) is pretty beginner, with a high connection point, to dampen any over zealous weight distrobution by noobs such as myself.
I found the experiance on a whole, to be nice, something that I would actually think about taking skywards, sometime in my future flights. I would compare this wings groundhandling action to something similar to a paratech p12, one size too small or a tad over the weight spec (with ultimate area loadage).
Anyway, before anyone starts to think Im an expert...which I am most definitly not...I have to show you a reason why I decided to call it a day. Remeber, I am crazy. This is not the first time I have done something as crazy as this...and its deffinitly not the crazyest thing I have done to date.
Originaly, I thought that the front would pass me by heading over the Rhein and on towards Karlsruhe. effectivly leaving a nice somewhat usable path of stable wind to wing on....I had my eye on the front moving in. Someone stoped in their car and actually got out and asked me if everything was okay. It was at this point in time that I actually figured that I should call it a day. None too soon, I pulled all the lines together and shot this picture.
I managed to grab my gear just as the wind started to really pick up. I assume that there were windspeeds of up 50 or so kmh, and that, just as I started to head towards a nearby underpass to foldup the wing.
What I learned today is I really really really need better schooling in meteorology. I thought I had correctly assesed the situation, I guess not, and nature is not to be underestimated.
Im lucky to have gotten away with my life.... again..... this is seriously the last time I do something this crazy....I hope. ;)
Cheers and good flight.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
The Walters near and wide.
SO.......
After leaving this post to stew a while, seeing that blogger just didnt post my very well tought out and politicaly correct post, I guess its time to rewrite this one.
The walter family has been well strewn. There was a time when we had one bro in the states, another in uganda, another in germany, 3 siblings and a mom in romania, with 3 in japan.
This year, we have a small family reunion going on in taiwan. phil, sony, gabe n jess are all off in the far off asia.
Moms spending the summer in romania.
Stef and joykie along with kai and myself are still here in DE.
Sims , mum n dad are further east then the rest....
So , you may be asking yourself, "Why is rew going on about this?". Simple, well statisticly Im kinda sure most of us will agree with me, that together we may have spent more time in far far way far off places then any other family that ...atleast, I know of.
The big deal is; it would appear as if we are trending more towards family gatherings. Im thinking, if we keep this up we may just may...tend further towards this trend of gathering.
Im seeing things this way:
Bro #1 works for colabora
Sister #1 works for the scouts international
Bro #2 is getting a job at buffalo networks
Bro# 3 is a very very famous Teacher in taiwan
bro #4 Is studing art
Sister #2 is in university (awsome)
Sister #3 is a missionary
and my favorite sister of all is studing and is an aspiring young writer.
That little list was , not for the walters, but more for all the others who dont really get my very strewn family. :)
Cheers
After leaving this post to stew a while, seeing that blogger just didnt post my very well tought out and politicaly correct post, I guess its time to rewrite this one.
The walter family has been well strewn. There was a time when we had one bro in the states, another in uganda, another in germany, 3 siblings and a mom in romania, with 3 in japan.
This year, we have a small family reunion going on in taiwan. phil, sony, gabe n jess are all off in the far off asia.
Moms spending the summer in romania.
Stef and joykie along with kai and myself are still here in DE.
Sims , mum n dad are further east then the rest....
So , you may be asking yourself, "Why is rew going on about this?". Simple, well statisticly Im kinda sure most of us will agree with me, that together we may have spent more time in far far way far off places then any other family that ...atleast, I know of.
The big deal is; it would appear as if we are trending more towards family gatherings. Im thinking, if we keep this up we may just may...tend further towards this trend of gathering.
Im seeing things this way:
Bro #1 works for colabora
Sister #1 works for the scouts international
Bro #2 is getting a job at buffalo networks
Bro# 3 is a very very famous Teacher in taiwan
bro #4 Is studing art
Sister #2 is in university (awsome)
Sister #3 is a missionary
and my favorite sister of all is studing and is an aspiring young writer.
That little list was , not for the walters, but more for all the others who dont really get my very strewn family. :)
Cheers
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
A cool site promoting hardware hacks.
This is a cool hack...DTMF is soemthing I have been interested in figuring out more about as its also apperantly what is used to encrypt certain Radio package transferes.
This however is way cooler. Its a bluetooth weatherboard that uses a java app on your phone to recieve all variometer information and display it on your phone. It even has GPS.
What it does:
This however is way cooler. Its a bluetooth weatherboard that uses a java app on your phone to recieve all variometer information and display it on your phone. It even has GPS.
What it does:
it tells me my speed over ground.
It can tell me my climb and decend speed.
What it dosnt:
I would still need to write some software to caculate things like...interface....more on this later
Price: The Price is not exactly dirt cheep (Im counting @ 200 usd afg), it is however about the same ammount that I would pay for a kinda "okay/used/old" vario from back in the day. Lets just say for this kind of capability , you usually pay around >400€
Benefit: you use your phone to monitor the information via bluetooth, so if your paragliding, you dont have to worry about getting an extra piece of gear to lug with you. I have a small solar charger panel, so adding these two items might be a really cool idea.
any way. Theres alot of fun stuff on this site...so check it out.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
woes of mac
Yesterday I awoke to a frozen mac. Nothing was responding. I forced a reboot and found that the system was apparently screwed.
I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out what could have caused the problem, was it the 64 gb of swap that I removed from my hard drive last week (8gb ram). With all that ram, osx seems to like putting a bunch of swap there for no apparent reason.
At the end of the day, I figured that the drive was shot. That would be really bad, as for one, a bunch of documents that I was finishing for my AB would have been gone with no backup, as well as a software project due in September (have been working on it since December) would have to be rewritten from scratch.
I broke out in panic when trying to boot hirens or sysrescue. Nothing could find sda, and due (I assume) to macs different device naming, none of my live systems could find /dev/cdrom. This meant that none of the live systems could mount their images on /mnt to continue on to the actual file repair systems.
Finally I found a copy of ubuntu 10.10, It booted. I started Gparted and ran some package updates to get hfs and journaled hfs+ file system support. I assume that hfsprogs is a kernel add-on, which means I would need to reboot or reload the kernel before being able to fix up the file system. On a live system this would mean acutally loosing hfs support since the cd is not writeable to save any changes, and a usb system cant be done due to apples stupidity and not allowing usb boots, something that has been standard since 07 or so.
A wisp of genious came along as I found a 2gb sdcard. I decided to install the /boot partition to the sdcard, as well as grub boot loader and install the rest of the system on a 8gb usb drive ... Its installing now.
--update--
The nice part about this, well at some point in time I installed an ubuntu system on a resizrd partitions free space, I gave it @30 gb, more then enough to install a rescue OSX.
Still I have the porblem of accessing my main hd as it is encrypted.
A cool thing is also, on my iomega ix-200 nas; to get time machine to backup over the network you do have to turn off security completely. Seeing that I am the only one to access my wpa2 enterprize encrypted wireless network (provided by the great dd-wrt people over at Buffalo) I think Im kinda safe, maybe thats the problem; I am too secure in my knowledge, so when it breaks, so do I. :( Also a nice aditive of not having security on is, the ssh connectivity to the drive. You can still controll access via users and shadows, the old linux way, but no shiny new web interface for that.
Oh these words of wisdom while fixing broken things that I could have avoided by trying to be less complicated in my "apparent Knowledge"....Im working on it.
I spent the better part of the day trying to figure out what could have caused the problem, was it the 64 gb of swap that I removed from my hard drive last week (8gb ram). With all that ram, osx seems to like putting a bunch of swap there for no apparent reason.
At the end of the day, I figured that the drive was shot. That would be really bad, as for one, a bunch of documents that I was finishing for my AB would have been gone with no backup, as well as a software project due in September (have been working on it since December) would have to be rewritten from scratch.
I broke out in panic when trying to boot hirens or sysrescue. Nothing could find sda, and due (I assume) to macs different device naming, none of my live systems could find /dev/cdrom. This meant that none of the live systems could mount their images on /mnt to continue on to the actual file repair systems.
Finally I found a copy of ubuntu 10.10, It booted. I started Gparted and ran some package updates to get hfs and journaled hfs+ file system support. I assume that hfsprogs is a kernel add-on, which means I would need to reboot or reload the kernel before being able to fix up the file system. On a live system this would mean acutally loosing hfs support since the cd is not writeable to save any changes, and a usb system cant be done due to apples stupidity and not allowing usb boots, something that has been standard since 07 or so.
A wisp of genious came along as I found a 2gb sdcard. I decided to install the /boot partition to the sdcard, as well as grub boot loader and install the rest of the system on a 8gb usb drive ... Its installing now.
--update--
The nice part about this, well at some point in time I installed an ubuntu system on a resizrd partitions free space, I gave it @30 gb, more then enough to install a rescue OSX.
Still I have the porblem of accessing my main hd as it is encrypted.
A cool thing is also, on my iomega ix-200 nas; to get time machine to backup over the network you do have to turn off security completely. Seeing that I am the only one to access my wpa2 enterprize encrypted wireless network (provided by the great dd-wrt people over at Buffalo) I think Im kinda safe, maybe thats the problem; I am too secure in my knowledge, so when it breaks, so do I. :( Also a nice aditive of not having security on is, the ssh connectivity to the drive. You can still controll access via users and shadows, the old linux way, but no shiny new web interface for that.
Oh these words of wisdom while fixing broken things that I could have avoided by trying to be less complicated in my "apparent Knowledge"....Im working on it.
Monday, May 23, 2011
New post!
So, Things are moving along. My software project is moving forward albeit slowly.
My final presentation is on the 18th of July, after that I'm oficcially done with my AB and may call myself a computer scientist.
Other news:
I'm looking for doners to an Andrew cause.
I'd like to make a trip to Italy during the Easter holidays to finish my A-Schein.I'm looking at a price tag of around 700€ complete.Seeing as I'm currently not able to take a second job due to the stipulations defined in my contract, I wanted to see if anyone maybe able to help towards this wish seeing completion.
If anyone Feels the wish to help make this dream of mine come true....leave a post in the comment section below.
I personally will be trying to make it happen by doing a bunch of little oddjobs to try and save up for this.
My final presentation is on the 18th of July, after that I'm oficcially done with my AB and may call myself a computer scientist.
Other news:
I'm looking for doners to an Andrew cause.
I'd like to make a trip to Italy during the Easter holidays to finish my A-Schein.I'm looking at a price tag of around 700€ complete.Seeing as I'm currently not able to take a second job due to the stipulations defined in my contract, I wanted to see if anyone maybe able to help towards this wish seeing completion.
If anyone Feels the wish to help make this dream of mine come true....leave a post in the comment section below.
I personally will be trying to make it happen by doing a bunch of little oddjobs to try and save up for this.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Südtirol: Rodeneck
Rodeneck was great. We didnt have the best weather, but spirits were high on the few days we did fly. On average a trip down to rodeneck will give you about 5 - 7 flights a day for 7 days. A liter of absolute and 4 L of orange juice made for good fun on rainy afternoons.
I made some videos while I was there. those vids somehow ended in disaster...:) (noone died). I managed to get some other much better footage uncut and full of crazy faces. They are posted here, for your enjoyment.
Peace
I made some videos while I was there. those vids somehow ended in disaster...:) (noone died). I managed to get some other much better footage uncut and full of crazy faces. They are posted here, for your enjoyment.
Peace
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