10/6

Had a great weekend at a work party/fly-in at Soboba, a flying site near San Jacinto, California. Talk about a fun time! We worked all saturday morning widening a leg of the trail used to hike up to launch to 6′ wide, to make hiking easier, and to hopefully allow quads and hardy golf carts to help bring equipment, gear, and pilots up the hill. We all got dusty as hell from the upslope wind, but it was definitely worth it. Got some lunch at McDonald’s/Taco Bell and made complete messes of their bathrooms trying to wash off the layers of dirt and dust.

Got back to the LZ, and headed up the hill! The hike wasn’t so bad, a little bit of good exercise before getting to fly. Did some para-waiting for a while, and finally most folks got off the hill around 5 PM, give or take. It was a classic glass off, with butter smooth lift anywhere you went looking for it. Had a nice hour and a half flight, and managed not to screw up my first landing in a foreign LZ. Here’s a screenshot:

And here’s the IGC and (since they’re in high demand) KML files. The KML file could use some work, I haven’t yet figured out how to 1) actually see the individual track points or 2) see a path that includes the elevation so you can actually see the 3D path like the one rendered by GPLIGC.

Camped out that night, enjoyed a nice BBQ with everyone, then crashed in the shipping container at the bottom of the hill. Spent the next day hanging out, working a bit on some stuff by the shipping container, then headed home since we were grounded by rain.

Altogether, an awesome weekend, and a lot of fun flying for the first time at a new site. Big thanks to Darrel, Bob, Alan, Elvis (and his awesome dog Leeloo Dallas Multipass Lopez), Roger, Mike, Regina, and everyone else that was there and made it such a great time flying there!

EDIT: Thanks to some examples from my brother, 3ric, The KML file now has a path that includes all the altitude information. You can right click the path, click properties, go to the altitude tab, and click “Extend path to ground” if you want to help visualize the path that way. Here’s a screen grab of the path in google earth:

So a while ago I took advantage of my REI dividends and bought myself a Garmin Foretrex 101 to take with me on my paraglider flights. Three weekends ago I managed to sneak a flight in, and recorded my first track on the thing. I found GPLIGC a while ago, which is a utility for viewing the statistics of flights, as well as doing 3D models of IGC files (which you can create from the Garmin format easily). I managed to get the elevation data installed/configured, but I haven’t yet figured out how to get the giant 6000×6000 pixel GeoTIFF images from here into a format GPLIGC can digest, so no orpho map backgrounds for my stuff just yet. Anyways, here’s a rendering of my flight:

It was a nice hour long flight, beautiful conditions, etc. I actually only landed because I was starting to feel a bit queasy after the previous night’s festivities (if you look closely at the flight, you can see a spiral or two in there that I pulled to try to get down faster (and for practice as well).

You can grab the IGC file here. Fun stuff, I wish GPLIGC were anything *other* than Perl/Tk, but until I magically find time to hack on something myself (maybe leverage Turtle? Do something new myself?), it will definitely do. Fun stuff!