Monday, August 02, 2010

Julia and her White Rabbit

Young Julia amazes me!  23 years old and flying for just five years (competing for only 3!) and she's up there with the big boys nearly every day.  Yesterday she came in with the lead gaggle taking tenth place for the day....tenth out of 150 pilots!  That's impressive....especially since she had altitude/airspace problems.  She told me this morning that she pulled out of the last thermal before the airspace at 1900 meters, 100 meters above the airspace so that by the time she glided and arrived there, she would be below it.  However, on glide while her 6030 barometric altitude was going down and showing she would be well below the 1800 meter ceiling, her GPS altitude wasn't decreasing.  Rather than risk going above the ceiling she dove down into the sink until her GPS altitude showed her below.  Apparently, the GPS altitude takes some time to update and she was needlessly blowing off height that she very much needed.  In the end, when the GPS did update, she found herself 500 meters below the ceiling and very low.  She lost valuable time that could have put her even higher in the standings.



Well done Julia and keep it up!!

4 comments:

Louise said...

Fantastic, really inspiring.

Paul T said...

Wow! Good for Julia. The first time I towed her up at Quest and noticed her towing skill and how she exited the tow with a huge wing over, I knew she was very talented.

ollie said...

She really is gonna beat Manfred soon!

Hadewych said...

she'll be world champion I'm sure