Hyner Report - First U2 Flight

[DanTuck]

Well, it was a short trip for me but as always, still worth it. I arrived Sat afternoon about 1:00 and had to leave Sun. about 1:00. I had considered canning the trip but the forecast had changed to being quite nice for Saturday so I made the haul with Olivia. We stopped in the LZ and then headed right up because a couple people had launched and the flag looked great! Straight in around 5-8 . There was a good crowd already set up on launch and I went to work putting together the U2. The winds remained consistent and pilots commenced launching, with some finding thermals and getting up and some sinking out. After a few preflights I got in my harness and got on launch. It cycled in and I was off, turned left and found some lift. As expected, I need to get used to the roll response but I still managed to get a few hundred feet up above the wall in a thermal. Actually, that's the highest I've been there. I lost it and cruised out, found some more light lift and extended the flight to about 15 minutes. I was amazed at how little altitude I lost lapping the LZ and camping area before my approach. This thing can gliiiiide and I never took it off 1/3 VG. I set up my approach and I got knocked around a little on final but kept it under control, and came in for a few-step landing. Wow, wow, wow. I love this glider and can't wait to fly it some more and get tuned in.

Sunday morning we kind of slept in and didn't get going until 8:45. I didn't think there would be much chance the clouds would last long enough to drive up and set up but, what the hey, we gave it a shot. The cloudbase was not much more than 200' AGL and they were thick as we drove up and through them. Oddly, the tops of the clouds were a good 5-600' below the mountain tops and still solid. Sweet, plenty of time to set up the Falcon but no pilots. Huh?! Whatever, I got set up and then Jim and Brian V-H showed up with their Falcons. Cool! We all launched within a minute of each other got a really nice cloud dive. After that Olivia and I got some breakfast, broke camp and hit the road. It was great to see the Hyner crew and great to try out the U2! I'm pretty stoked.

[tdilisio]

Great report and excellent video Dan. Thanks for sharing it.

[CraginS]

Sweet flights. Congrats on the new wing. You will love it. Thanks for sharing the fun vids. Pretty nice to have a ground crew photographer as well as the wing-mounted cameras. Thanks to Olivia for adding that dimension to your video reports.