Diana2 Flight profile

As per Piet's post, yesterday saw the thermal conditions at BERG getting better and better. At about lunch time, I launched the Diana 2 on it's 4th winch launch and decided to join Tony, Charl and Piet who were in very strong lift under a huge cloud which was building directly above the field. I must say when I looked up it was difficult to spot the Tsotsie's at speck height. Charl/Piet flying Charls glider which has flaps, had the flaps fully deployed and yet the plane kept climbing, amazing lift.

My flight was slightly delayed until we got a slight breeze, just to have a bit of airflow over the wings at launch, after gaining some height indicated as the first peak on the graph, I moved around the sky searching for the core of this powerfull thermal. Once it was located I banked into it and fed in some up. The Diana 2 has proved to be an awesome thermal as well as slope ship and very soon the altitude numbers started climbing. Blake was reading off the Eagle Tree Dashboard and we gained 20 to 30 meters on each circle. The time to height was only minutes and topped out at just over 520 mtrs above launch height.

At this height things start getting small but it is my intention to set some altitude records later in the year and with good optics we can go a lot higher. The clear cloudless winter sky may offer better vision for this. The BERG field lies on the one approach for Lanseria and altough the big stuff comes over at about 1000mtrs plus, it is prudent not to hang around at these heights. I deployed the flaps and started a spiral descent. I am really happy with the results. I managed to lose a lot of height in about a minute and yet the speed remained fairly constant throughout the flight and only peaked at a little over 100kmph. On an earlier flight a high speed pass recorded about 180kmph and no flutter on the control surfaces.

At the bottom of the Altitude graph in purple you can see the variations in the speed indicated with the grey line. At this point I dived, pulled up and did a roll followed by a complete stall and recovery, causing the airspeed at one point to go to the zero line.

I was experiencing some loss of signal problems with this variometer system, but downloaded a new revision of software and this seems to have resolved the signal strength and low packet rate problems and its working better than before.



Hopefully when Peter's new tug gets going we will have many more oppurtunities to fly our big gliders. Aerotow will be our "NEXT BIG THING"

Cheers for now
Only 2 months to the Sungazer.
Mike