Ed's Great Adventure Soaring Trip

Wednesday June 14, 2000

Another pretty good day.  Left Wilcox AZ at about 11:45am.  Motored up to 8,000 and proceeded to shut down the engine.  However, I had some recent work done on it and one of the decompression valves had to be plugged.  As a result I'm now finding it almost impossible to stop the engine in flight.  The only way to do it is to kill the ignition (of course) then stall the plane and keep it in a stall for 30 -50 seconds.  Not a real comforting feeling.

Anyway, I was able to thermal most of the way from Wilcox to Estrella gliderport, just south of Phoenix, but I did have to restart twice.  One one occasion I was trying to work some lift over a small mountain line and ended up in more sink than lift.  After getting quite close to the top of the mountain (500ft ??) I proceeded to a lower hill and still nothing.  Finally about 1,000 feet AGL I started the motor.  Good thing it worked because if this was not the middle of no-where, it had to be damn close to it.  Landing conditions would have been very bad, maybe not even that good.

At any rate all is well, made it to Estrella.  Only took one picture on the way of a small town (which was about 40 miles from my middle of no-where) and a picture of the rig after landing at Estrella.

Conditions are quite hot, 112 today in Phoenix and very windy.  I landed into a 25-30 mph headwind.  So we've decided to get up early, put the glider back in the trailer and drive tomorrow (Thursday) to California.

A small town on the way.

After landing at Estrella

Map of the flight (click Here)