70 miles from Bill's Hill

[pink_albatross]

When: Sunday, 18 September 2011
Who: Tom
From where: Bill's Hill
To where: Home, Pa
Distance: 70 miles straight line via google distance tool
Equipment: don't remember - some sort of high performance paraglider
Retrieve: Dan T.
Details: unknown, hopefully Tom will fill us in

--- fixed the units. 70 MILES (112 km) sorry about the euro-glitch.

[XCanytime]

I'd sure like to hear from Tom about his flight after spending 3+ hours clearing the slot so that hang gliders could safely launch. On the drive up the sky looked spectacular with streets galore tracking slightly north of west. However, arriving at 11:45A it was quite light on launch and there was lotsa work to be done. A team of close to 10 pilots attacked the slot and did a great job of clearing a good portion of the slot. Plenty of PG pilots flew over and over from noontime till after 6P, some soaring, most sledding, and Tom killing it going 70 miles XC. Two HG pilots got a couple of sledders each in. I was beat from the work so I didn't even take the glider off of the truck. Still, an absolutely gorgeous day to be out and about in south central PA. Bacil

[Dan T]

I picked Tom up in Indiana PA, at the home of my good friends Mark and Sheila Gardner. Sheila was enroute home from Ohio when she returned my phone message and picked Tom up at the Sheets gas station in Indiana PA, where he had been given a ride to by the residents in the nearby village of Home PA that he met after landing.

While visiting the Gardner's for a few minutes, Tom mentioned that once he got high he was able to make the entire journey without so much as a single low save. He just found and stayed on the seams of the lift lines which he declared were very straight. He also mentioned that he had to fly into the whispies or the nearly completely depleted clouds. If the clouds were depleted the next thermals were starting. If they were anything like mature the lift was dead and sink had set in.

Quite a flight and a very long day. I got home at 3:00 AM.

By the way Bacil worked on that slot the whole day. He was still at it long after everybody else had packed it in and gone flying. I don't mean to diminish the efforts of the others, there was a veritable army of people hacking away when we first got there. The slot looks better than I have ever seen it.

Dan

[RichH]

You have 70 miles posted but then in the body of one of the accounts it has 70 km ..just for clarification is it miles or Km?? either way a good flight just wanted to know???

[Dan T]

It's 70 miles, over 100 Kilometers.

Dan

[RichH]

Thats a great flight !! Congrats

[tomceunen]

Classical XC flight under partly cloudstreet without bombing out, marking 100K the thermal day ended and I glided from the last cloudbase position without turning to 112K.
Two slow points ; just after take off to get into the lift and secondly south of Altoona but abundant lift and birds helped me easily up.
Dan, thanks for the retrieval!
Details on
http://www.paraglidingforum.com/leonardo/flight/508533

[Larry Huffman]

Nice flight Tom. I've landed in the next field on a flight from Templeton. I friend of mine used to live there.

Larry

[Flying Lobster]

What a fabulous flight! When I came through in May on my way to Maine Bill's was on in a major way, and I was surprised there were very few people out. The big flights down south so far this year have mostly been on easterly days. Maybe it's global climate change.

marc