CROSS COUNTRY IN A SELF-LAUNCH GLIDER By: Joe Dobronski Posted: November 17 2002
CROSS COUNTRY IN A SELF-LAUNCH GLIDER
Since June 2000, I have been flying the Stemme S10-VT motorglider. STEMME USA, the marketing arm for the German manufacturer in Strausberg, Germany, sells this self-launching glider. Marc Arnold, the VP of STEMME USA, has an office in Clayton MO. The Stemme S10 "Chrysalis" is shipped to the USA and my job is to test fly this 75-foot wingspan self-launching sailplane after assembly and then checkout the new owner when necessary to get them a self-launch glider endorsement required by the FAA. The Stemme is a high performance two place side-by-side sailplane with a glide ratio of 50 to 1. A turbo-charged Rotax 914 engine powers the S10 whose wings can be folded to fit in a standard T-hanger. I have had the pleasure of delivering S10-VTs under power to Minden NV, Las Vegas NV, Colorado, Virginia and Texas and one to northern California.
They have all been interesting flights but the one to California was the most enjoyable. The weather was good enough to have some spectacular views of this great country. After a shakedown flight at Alton, IL, the new owner John Williams and I proceeded to Spirit Airport in St Louis. Since the weather was deteriorating, we decided to spend the remainder of the day at Spirit to give John some dual instructions. Spirit Tower was nice enough to let us make stop and gos on busy runway 26L. After five landings, we saw a snow shower moving toward Spirit and decided to quit for the day. However, before we could get the wings folded to put the glider into my friend Jim Rice's T-hanger, the airplane was covered with snow. We foolishly neglected to remove the snow and were sorry the next morning when we found it had turned into ice. We had been distracted with two problems we had encountered, and were trying to fix, which were a poor radio and a stall warning horn that came on too soon on landing. We thought we had resolved the radio problem with the purchase of a hand-held radio and we taped over the hole in the nose to turn off the stall warning. Taping the hole turned out to be a mistake since there is an adjustment under the panel to change the angle of attack setting revealing my limited experience at that time.
After the delay in removing the ice and frost the morning of February 1st, and an aborted flight because of the stall warning, we took-off for Santa Fe, NM with a planned fuel stop at Wichita. Although the Stemme has a cruise speed of 130 knots and a range of 780 nautical miles, we chose to break up the trip into four legs. We were able to activate our VFR flight plan, but then had trouble getting any radio range and had problems receiving flight following.
Therefore, we went to Emporia, Kansas for fuel to avoid Wichita's high-density traffic. We landed after a flight time of three hours. Although the weather was not too bad, we did have to skirt some clouds North of Wichita. Next, was a 3.1-hr flight to Dalhart Texas. Upon landing there, the tips of the seventy-five foot wings just cleared the snowdrifts on the edge of the plowed runway and caused me a little concern. The previous delays and early sunset prevented us from going to Santa Fe, so we spent the night in the panhandle of Texas.
We arrived at Santa Fe the next morning after a two-hour uneventful flight. The panel mounted GPS with moving map display came in while flying around the mountains.
After refueling the aircraft near President Dwight Eisenhower's "Air Force One" Constellation, we flew the next leg in 3.8 hrs to Cedar City, Utah. We passed over the most beautiful country on this leg: Los Alamos, Santa Fe National Forrest, the Navajo Indian reservation, Monument Valley, Glen Canyon with the Prussian blue colored Lake Powell, and beautiful Bryce Canyon. The white snow on the ground produced great contrast with the topography in this area and the fantastic visibility made these sights spectacular when compared to the poor visibility we had when I flew the first Stemme to Utah last July. I had never seen so many gliders in one spot as there were in Minden that previous summer. On that occasion, David Bingham and I did some serious soaring the day after we had arrived. Upon hitting strong lift a meager ten minutes after takeoff, the propeller retracted automatically after we secured the engine, and we then closed the nose cone to reduce drag. Heading Southeast from Minden over the mountains, strong lift soon took us up to 15,000 feet. We had a wonderful view of the snow capped Sierra Nevada Mountains as we passed Mono Lake on this terrifically clear day. As we passed Bishop, we heard someone say on the radio that there were 20 sailplanes flying a competition out of that airport and warning that everybody be careful. However, we only saw half a dozen sailplanes there and none were as high as we were then flying. At Lone Pine, just North of Edwards AFB, we had flown over 250 kilometers into the wind and decided to turn around and go home. Getting back to Minden was no problem and we landed as a glider after the awesome flight of five hours and forty minutes. After landing and turning off on a taxiway, we started the engine and taxied to our tie-down spot. What a great soaring machine for this great soaring country! I have to cringe when I think of the two years of 500-km attempts that I made in the Nimbus II before I finally got my Diamond Award distance by going downwind to Mississippi from St Louis, MO. Ugh! What fabulous soaring conditions they have out West.
After a night in Cedar City on the trip with John Williams, we flew over the desolate country of Nevada to Hawthorn, Nevada, a military munitions area. It took 2.9 hours with the headwind resulting in a ground speed of only 110 knots. We had also encountered some strong wave lift going over some of the mountains at 10,500 feet and had to overcome the temptation to secure the engine and do some soaring. Hawthorn was a pretty area with a snow-capped mountain behind the large crystal blue lake near the airport. However, there was not a soul to be found and we fueled the glider ourselves at a credit card pump.
The last 2.1 hour leg to Rogers Airport in Chester, CA took us directly over the city of Reno. Once over the airport there, we changed our flight plan route to go direct since the visibility was so good we saw the 10,500-foot peak of Mt. Lassen, an extinct volcano located northwest of Chester’s Lake Almanor. After descending over the lake, we landed at the airport to complete our adventurous journey from St Louis. This interesting journey took less than 17 hours of flying with a fuel burn of around 5 gallons per hour. What a way to see this great country of ours.
