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da Rock -> RE: Flying site (7/14/2006 1:10:03 PM)
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If you plan to thermal, then yes you do need a highstart. On most outings, you're going to launch-glide-land a bunch more times than you're going to find a thermal strong enough to use. Thermal flying is often an exercise more correctly called, "landing practice". The probability that you will find lift one each launch depends on a number of things: The higher you launch the more chance of finding lift. Some days you're not going to find any at all. Some days you're not going to find any for hours at a time. The larger your glider, the more chance to use the lift you find. And large gliders often find lift that small ones never got to. Large ones cover more ground from launch height. So they can search more area for lift. And they don't come down in still air as fast, so they're searching longer. And small ones often don't "suck up" nearly as good as large gliders do. I've been out a LOT of days where the 2meter gliders were all doing landing practice while the standards and larger were specking out. If you're only going to fly a discus launch glider, then don't sweat the high start. Learn to THROW the sucker. Small gliders like that spend a lot of time coming down, and the quicker you get it back up the better. The advantage will be that you'll not waste time with the highstart. You'll be in the air as often as your arm will hold out. You can also work each landing toward where you think you might find lift, and launch from a new location every launch. And with a small glider, you're going to need to launch a lot more than with larger gliders.
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