Slope Soaring At the Outer Banks

Hot! Always stand in the middle of your flight path, flying over your head and going equal distances in both directions. Why? You'll get sunburned on one side otherwise.   Turning upwind The turn made after slowly climbing while traveling upwind can gain you twice the altitude you had going into it, at the price of very little speed. If you enter with low speed, you'll have a hard time keeping control. The normal-speed upwind turn can be wide and sweeping and safely range far from the dune before hurtling back into the position and downwind. But the striking feature is the plane's capability to double its altitude before reversing course. And you'd better gain everything you can, because you'll need it. Flying characteristics seem to change completely as the turn is completed and you skitter back to the optimum lift band heading downwind. There seems to be no control, the plane lurches dangerously behind the lip before you can counter. Before, each move of the sticks produced a twitch in the planes attitude, now it lolls about, seemingly unable to respond.

No jokes about the 'downwind turn'!

As you lurch downwind a quick decision on where to turn has to be implemented. As you fly each part of the beach, some features of the dune will give spurts of lift as you fly by, and that's a good place to reverse direction. You can seemingly gain altitude on the downwind turn like you just did at the other end, but a sickening sinking always occurs just afterwards. Even as you pitch up and try to turn efficiently toward the sea and back towards yourself, the plane seems to come to a halt. You end up diving back toward the dune and flattening out for the return trip much lower than you'd expect. Oh well, at least now you have a reponsive beast, which surges up an inch, left around that hummock, banks out quickly&endash; and generally allows you to slowly win back your secure place above the obstacles.

Twilight above the turtle nesting ground- the actual point of Cape Hatteras is at right in far distance.

When upwind is downwind

Of course, the golden day will come where you've picked the perfect beach and the wind cooperates and blows directly at the dune. Magic happens. The lift goes out, over the beach, over the waves, and just keeps going. Twice I've flown it, and the amazing thing to me is that the lift stretches 100 yards or more in front of the dune, but is only 50 feet high or so. And smooooooooooooth.

Finishing up the plane at the beach house. After spending the first two evenings building, my vacation changed to hours of flying a day. I'm sure this Zagi covered 500 miles in the remaining 5 days.   Bigger Wind At about 20 knots, the wind is faster than the plane flies and you can't maintain position. When there's even just a small angle between wind and dune you can probably fly downwind, turn back, but flop to the ground as you give enough down elevator to keep from being blown backwards. Whenever I'm using down elevator most of the time, I figure it's time for ballast. For a 12 oz. Plane you may need 5 or more ounces of ballast. For a Zagi THL, 8 ounces increases the wing loading from 4 to 6 oz./sq. ft, and less doesn't seem to make a lot of difference. After you get it right, all manuvers are possible and are the same except that things happen a lot quicker- and collisions with the ground are faster with more weight behind them. Ouch. I've never found the upward wind limit of a Zagi, just my own inability to wiggle the sticks fast enough.

Final Approach

Take spare batteries- my 300mh Zagi receiver battery runs down in 3.5 hours and isn't enough! I found the flying intoxicating in such a georgeous setting, and wonder why other people even come here if they're not flying. I've only run across two other flyers, both of whom were practically delerious with joy. When I got home, I found tiny grains of sand still clinging to the ailerons.

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