Many pilots wonder what it really takes to
set a world record. Some wonder what it's like to fly at a place like Zapata or
other world class sites. Cloudsuck answers these and other questions while
telling the story of how I set the current Distance World Record for Rigid
Wings. Over this winter, I am pleased to make the book available as a gift to my
readers in serialized form. Each Monday, another chapter will be available for
you to enjoy here on the Oz Report. The best read is the one in it's entirety,
and both the soft cover book and an ebook are available to purchase here:
http://ozreport.com/cloudsuck.php. You can find the Kindle version on
Amazon.

If you enjoy the serialized installments, you may wish to skip the text below
and jump directly to this week's chapter, including any graphics or pictures
here: http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck5.pdf

I hope you enjoy the book and this week's chapter as much as I enjoyed writing
it.

The Cauldron from Hell

Albuquerque sits at about six
thousand feet on the valley floor of the Rio Grande River, with ten
thousand-foot Sandia Peak towering above it just to the east. The city can grow
only so far eastward before it's stopped by topography; Indian ownership of the
lands at the base (and perhaps the face) of the mountain adds another barrier.

Access to Sandia Peak is made convenient by a tramway that
hauls tourists, hikers, mountain bikers, and hang glider pilots up to the
restaurant and launch at the top. The east side of the mountain is a gentle,
tree covered ski area. The west is a precipice, the sharp edge of an up-thrusted
plate.

As you look down from the windows of the tram car you see
pinnacles and sharp ridges of rock with debris below. Amongst the trees below
the rocks, pieces of a passenger jet that crashed into the mountainside years
ago are still visible. You can’t help but wonder whether searchers would find
your remains if you were to meet a similar fate.

The hang glider launch next to the restaurant starts with a
steep slope for thirty feet, then drops off sharply five hundred feet down a
cliff face. The prevailing winds come out of the west, smashing against the
cliff face. It often gets too windy to fly. Light winds — or no winds at all —
are ideal for hang gliding here. You’d like the thermals generated from the
valley floor to be guided gently to the mountainside and finally to the launch,
maintaining a usable shape instead of being blown to shreds.

As you look out from the launch to your right, you see a
series of pinnacles and rock faces that form the edge of a bowl and then march
off to the west toward the bottom of the tramway. This line of pinnacles makes a
natural thermal generator, even for pilots who are low. But being low behind
those towers gives even experienced pilots pause. This is the cauldron from
hell.

Tight, strong thermals forming on the pinnacles and mixing
with the winds — especially when there is a bit of north in the winds — produce
some of the most turbulent air that anyone hang glides in voluntarily. But all
too often this is where you have to go if you want to get up at Sandia Peak.
When there isn't a big thermal coming up the bowl in front of launch — and often
there isn't — you fly off to the right if you want to stay up.

I was back in Albuquerque in June 1998 for my fifth time at
the Sandia Classic, a national level competition, so I had no excuses about not
knowing any better. I actively disliked flying Sandia's west face, but was more
than happy to be up and over the back, flying east over the high desert
flatlands of central New Mexico. In 1998 most pilots thought that terrible
turbulence was the price we had to pay, to get high enough to fly in the areas
really conducive to long cross-country flights. But the recent long flights in
Florida were beginning to prove us wrong.

We were here in early June because later in July the
monsoon rains would come to New Mexico. Moisture would swirl up from the south
then, causing overdevelopment and dangerous thunderstorms. Even the desert has
its comparatively rainy season. But June was the end of the dry season, and the
desert was brown.

The setup area behind the launch was limited, so only sixty
pilots could fly in the Sandia Classic — but this year only thirty pilots were
competing. Since this was one of four U.S. national competitions, all the top
competition pilots were here, hoping to earn enough points to make the U.S.
National Team. Other pilots, having experienced Sandia’s turbulence, had elected
not to return.

Larry Tudor was here. So were Chris Arai and Jim Lee from
the Wills Wing team. Brad Koji, another National Team pilot, was flying with
Larry on the newly formed Icaro 2000 sponsored team. I had first met all these
guys at the 1989 Manufacturer's League meet in Lakeview, and by now they were
familiar faces.

This was the first big competition of the year. We were all
having a good time, setting up our gliders down behind the launch, renewing our
acquaintance with old friends we hadn’t seen since the previous year. No one was
in a hurry. Kari Castle took a photo of Brad and me talking strategy..

Brad was the star of the “Front Range” pilots, the guys who
flew on the eastern side of the Rockies from sites near Golden and Boulder.
Small and thin, the quiet spoken Brad had left his wife and two kids at home to
join in the camaraderie found among the nation’s top hang glider pilots. His
jovial good spirits made light of the scary moments that we would face soon in
front of the mountain.

On that first day the task was a dogleg over the back,
northeast about thirty miles to the small town of Lamy, then south along Highway
285 to Clines Corners on Interstate 40. With a predicted wind of fifteen to
twenty miles per hour out of the south later that afternoon, it would be hard
for the competitors to get to goal from the turnpoint.

The trees on the back of Sandia Peak stop at the base of the
mountain, where the brown desert takes over as you head to Lamy. In the higher
spots you’ll find thick patches of juniper, but mostly it’s sagebrush and cholla
cactus. The cacti are usually far enough apart that they don’t present too great
a hindrance if you have to land out.

Conditions that day had started out uninspiring, with cloudbase a
thousand feet below the launch at the peak, putting us in fog as we had set up.
We expected cloudbase to rise during the day, but it looked as though it
wouldn’t be getting very high. We were used to climbing up to almost eighteen
thousand feet out to the east of Sandia. This was normally a place where we used
a lot of oxygen.

It wasn’t until late in the day, around three PM, that pilots were
able to get up to thirteen thousand feet — only three thousand over launch — and
head east over the back toward Lamy. At about five o’clock Oleg Bondarchuck, a
top Ukrainian pilot, and Brad Koji were near Lamy at about ten thousand feet.

Continue reading here:
http://ozreport.com/docs/Cloudsuck5.pdf.