Last Saturday our SOSA member Jerzy Szemplinski broke the Canadian record with a 1,000 km flight at “the Ridge”
The Ridge is a series of ridges and valleys in Pennsylvania about a 5.5 hour ride from Toronto at a place called Mifflin County Airport, just outside Lewiston. Jerzy and 3 friends make an annual pilgrimage to Mifflin and what binds them is that they all fly top performance SZD gliders (and they secretly all speak Polish!).
The party of 4 arrived at Mifflin last Thursday May 4th. Jerzy, Richard Krolikowski from New York and another pair from the Chicago area. Saturday was the big day after a couple of days of measly 255km and 466km flights. Saturday didn’t look promising but Jerzy took a tow at 11:00am and by 11:30 the wind had picked up from the north west. Things didn’t look altogether promising and two of the SZD crowd chickened out. Jerzy and Richard however took off on a south west track for their 1,000 kilometer journey.
You can see the flight entrered on the “On Line Contest” http://www.onlinecontest.org/ Amazingly anyone can download Jerzy’s flight and if you have "See you" software the flight can be played in 3D.
According to Jerzy the ridge works at about one wingspan above the treetops and about 300 meters above the valley floor. The ridge however is not continuous and he had to look for thermal lift in between the ridge lines. Roughly 80% of the flight was completed using ridge lift and the remainder using rough thermal lift. Sounds pretty adventurous!! Jerzy says that he had couple of challenging moments but whole flight was done in very safe fashion with air speed 80 to 90 kts 100-300 feet from the ridges.
The flight lasted for almost 9 hours with Jerzy and Richard landing out not far from Mifflin at 3 minutes before sunset and covering 1012 kilometers, a huge distance and at a recorded average of 114 kms per hour. The distance was good for a claim of the Canadian record in a club class glider using free 3 turn points.
Well done Jerzy
