Hi there everybody, welcome to another episode of the Cloud Based Mayhem. I've got a really special and very different show for you today. Those of you who follow the show no doubt remember a story I did a little over a year ago with Gordon Boker out in Minden. He broke the world record for distance in a sailplane. He flies an Arcus with a jet engine so he can self-launch. And the way he broke the record was flying in huge strong wave conditions but also flying at night with night vision goggles. So he took off in the morning, flew all day, and landed in the evening. He stayed up in the air for a little over 17 hours. Went over 3,000 K and then we did a show about it and a couple weeks later he went even farther than that.
The Arcus is a two-seater plane, a very special one. There's only four in the world. And Gordon flies for FedEx, has done that for a very long time, but he lives out on the east side of the Sierras near Minden, just south of Reno, to specifically fly a wave. You know the Perlan project has been down in South America chasing that for a couple decades. And they have a couple of their planes and a lot of their base there at the same place in Minden. So it's a hot spot for flying strong wave. And after the show, we're going to fly the Arcus. A little over a year ago, I said, hey, man, if you ever need somebody to ride in the seat, I don't know anything about sailplanes, but that sounds right up my alley. I would love to join you.
And a week ago, I got the call. Gordon was, I think, over in Belgium working and he said, hey, it looks like it's going to set up Monday. And I think we can launch in the middle of the night and fly a good section of the day. It's not going to be a record day because there's a bunch of moisture coming in kind of midday from the northwest. As the storm comes through and, you know, we'll have to be on the ground by then. But he felt like we could get probably a thousand K under our belts and in very strong wave conditions. And in fact, I think on top of slide, which is the paragliding launch there above Lake Tahoe that I used way back when we did the baby across the Sierras, it was blown over 80 miles an hour. So we were flying in really kind of low end of hurricane force winds.
At the top of the ridge tops there. But Gordon nailed it. I got on a jet and went out to Reno. He picked me up. We had an incredible dinner. Went over the weather. Played around with the night vision goggles out in his backyard to get used to those a little bit. And then went out to the airport just after midnight. Launched at 3.30 in the morning. And had one of the wildest, most cool rides I've ever had. It was really unbelievable. At one point, we were flying over 20 miles an hour. 250 knots going up. So that's about 300 miles an hour. And we did almost 1,200 K before the weather came in. And flying over these wave clouds and seeing that kind of sky.
I've always seen that from the ground, of course, being a paraglider. But being up in that stuff was pretty wild.
Very exceptional experience. And I took the audio gear with me. So I recorded little bits. As we went along in the hangar and the launch. And getting up and getting through the rotor. And then getting up into the very smooth wave. And extremely cold. Both of us had ice blocks for feet. And got to take the stick for a while. And he did a couple loops at the end. And then had a pretty rowdy landing because it was blowing super hard on the ground. And yeah, it was just wild. And I recorded all the audio. If you go to the show notes, I'll have a ton of pictures and video that we both took during the flight. The sunrise was exceptional.
And flying with night vision goggles is also exceptional. I'd never done that before. I'd never even looked through those before. But pretty amazing what you can see. You can see everything. Just way different. But awesome experience. Huge gratitude for Gordon to have me out. And his lovely wife. And their hospitality. And I hope you enjoy this show. Fly along at rocket speeds. It was awesome. Cheers. All
right. Good evening, everybody. Just hopped in a jet to fly out to Reno to join Gordon. He's sitting here with me. Hey, Gavin. Welcome. We're going to go have some fun. Yeah, we are. And he invited me out here because Skyside Sand Wave is going to blow up tonight. And it's going to get wild. So walk us through what we're looking at here, Gordon. We're looking at Skyside. All right. So Skyside is developed by Matthew Scudder. Unbelievable platform to use for either thermal forecasting or mountain wave or ridge or convergence, anything. But it's kind of a no-brainer to have this service that Matthew Scudder provides. And it's phenomenal. And it's very, very accurate. So what we're looking at tonight here, since we're focused on wave conditions, as you can see in the bottom left, I've got vertical velocity 16,000 feet.
That's basically the air movement. We're moving up. And anything in magenta or orange is indicative of mountain wave conditions. So if you follow the cursor along here, there's Truckee. Minden is where we're going to start off. And the Sierra Range follows all the way down here past Bishop, Lone Pine, the Owens Valley, and then all the way down to Eno Kern. So that's kind of our golden path or superhighway that we use in mountain wave conditions. Coming out of Minden. And so Minden being along that path, being right here, it's a really, really good starting point for long distance wave flights in a glider. And so I take advantage of that with my glider.
Tomorrow, Gavin and I will be sometime in the darkness of the night. We will probably take off since we're set up with night vision goggles and we're legal for night. These are obviously the wind barbs. Anything with kind of that triangle right here indicates that's a 50 knot tick and then that's a 10 knot tick. So disregard that 0.5 right there. That's just showing the lift in that area. So that's 55 knots of wind. And down the bottom left, you can see that's 16,000 feet is selected there. I can change that to 13,000 feet and it'll change the conditions of the wave. But since our flight's going to be probably a lot of it between 16 and 20,000 feet and hopefully above. I usually look at the 16,000 foot vertical velocity.
So what's happening tomorrow is we have a kind of cold front frontal system that's coming in that's bringing the jet stream in and basically we have a trough that's moving through that's bringing us some pretty strong southwesterly flow aloft.
So what we're going to do tomorrow is plan on utilizing that mountain wave and give Gavin a good ride and see if we can get some distance out of it. The one issue tomorrow based off the forecast is that the wave is going to shut down at probably one o 'clock. So that's the reason for taking off probably two or three in the morning is to take advantage of a little more time for distance. And what I'll do is if you look at the upper left part of the screen there. So that's at 0800 local. So that's eight o 'clock local in the morning at Minden time. And I'll just click as the day goes on. I'll kind of show you what we're kind of the plan is. So
I do have on another device the vertical velocity for 2 a.m. through 8 a.m. I don't have it on the desktop, but it lets us start off at 8 a.m. here. So we're going to take off in the Minden area, which is right here. And that's indicative of a really strong section of wave there. It's coming off of Jobes Peak. That's showing 9.2 knots, basically like 1100 foot per minute lift at 16,000 feet of mountain wave. So the goal would be to probably motor out, self-launch with the jet. Shut down, try to find this wave here with the night vision goggles. And there may or may not be any cloud markers. We don't know. But I'll have this. All this data will be downloaded on a tablet that I have that I can use in flight. So if the conditions are such that there's not enough moisture, we don't have any markers, clouds that is, to mark mountain wave, i.e.
rotor cloud or lenticular cloud. I can use this app and this is geo reference. So it'll show my position in this chunk of airspace. So I can kind of go to these hot spots if I'm kind of what we call blind flying. So thanks to Matthew Scudder, SkySight. Once again, this is like a huge game changer for I think for sure soaring and hopefully the paraglider world. But it's a great, great piece of software. So the goal is to kind of motor out at 2 or 3 in the morning, try to climb up in this lift and we'll have to see. But we might end up running up north towards Reno. Which shows another area strong left and then follow this wave band, which is coming off of the generator by the mountains and then run up towards possibly Susanville up here.
And you can see up here that that color indicates like 4 knots of lift at 16,000 feet, which should be plenty in order to stay up and keep moving. So keep in mind, we have quite a bit of wind that we're dealing with. So we're dealing with probably a southwesterly flow at about 50 knots. If we get above 20,000 feet, we'll see how how strong the wind gets in. So if we can run up north in the evening hours and then by the time we get back towards Minden, we will run south towards Mono Lake, Lee Vining area and then hopefully the weather will start picking up. So I'm going to slide this cursor forward. So that's 830 in the morning and you can see how that mountain wave changes as days go as the day goes on.
That's because wind direction is changing a lot. A lot of things are happening. So you can see very, very strong conditions in the Mono Lake Mammoth area and that's showing 9.2 knots at least. So that's about 1100 foot per minute with about a 55 knot wind at 16,000 feet. And this should be a really high energy area that I should be able to stay in and we'll be clipping along along the ground pretty quickly, probably 180 knots or something.
Hopefully I'll have a clearance with Oakland Center. So hopefully we'll be able to get above 20 or 18,000 feet. If that's the case, I'll probably get up high into the mid 20s. I'll obviously be on 02 and we're going to run south as the day goes on. So here we are at 11 a.m. You can see it's really cooking in the Owens Valley. And here's Bishop. So essentially from Bridgeport, Mono Lake area, it's just absolutely ripping all the way down here with this magenta. And so these will be very super high speed legs. So by the time I get down here. Down to the Bishop area, that is considered military airspace from Bishop on down in the Owens Valley. So I have a clearance with them. So I'll contact Joshua Approach. We'll get a Sage II clearance, which I've got already prearranged. And that Sage II clearance gives me clearance up to 29,000 feet.
So hopefully we'll be flying it near Red Line, climbing at a thousand feet per minute and basically going up like crazy along this magenta area. We'll try to get as far south as we can. And here we are at 1130 in the morning. So if we can run down to Lone Pine. A little south of Lone Pine. As you can see, south of Lone Pine, the winds start dropping off and that in turn softens the wave quite a bit. So the wave fizzles out just south of Lone Pine, kind of in the Elanche area, if anyone's familiar with that. So once we get here to the southernmost point, the key is going to be to get back before the weather starts moving in a minute and I'll show you what's happening here. So assume we're coming back. We're northbound at 11, 1130. We still got a rip in conditions, so we should be able to make good ground speed with a southwesterly flow.
We're going to have a really high, really good ground speed and a good tailwind component heading back home. So hopefully that'll get us back pretty quickly. So here's back in the Minden area. I assume by 12 hopefully we'll be in the Mammoth area, which is roughly right here. Still have good conditions. As we can see, the winds go pretty southerly here. And here's 1230. There's one o 'clock. You see everything falls apart. Look at that. There's Minden is right here. So the wave shuts down in Minden. And downwind of there, there's wave. But as we can see, if I go to, I'll go to the Cumulus page here, which is a new option. We can see what's happening here.
So here's the Minden area. You can see that with this frontal band starts moving through and rain starts crossing, creeping over the Sierra into the Carson Valley, which is our location of Minden-Octahoe Airport. So that's kind of where we're trying to get back to. So I think the tough part tomorrow will be trying to determine when that will actually happen. Right now it's showing about 130, rain pushing through in the Minden area. As you can see, it keeps trucking south or eastbound, south and southeastbound. So Minden is completely shut down by two o 'clock. But the rain kind of stops here. So my backup is if the rain ends up moving in or if we don't get back in time before the rain moves into the Minden area, there's an alternate airport here called Yarrington.
It's plenty wide for me to land on. We can land on that airport and wait for the rain to push through. As you can see here, it's 6, 5 p.m. The rain pushes through the Minden area. Everything opens up again. And so it's, the weather's gone post-frontal. So that very quick moving cold front. Band has moved through. And now the wave is completely gone as we can see here. I'll slide back to the vertical velocity for 16,000 feet. You can see the wave is pretty much gone. It shows very soft conditions here. And so it's gone post-frontal. But if we look south, it's still cranking down here because that's because all the energy with this cold front is moving southeast. So it's all that, all those high winds are starting to move out towards the southern Owens Valley and out towards the Vegas area.
So if all else fails, if we cannot get back to the Minden Airport by 1 o 'clock by the time the rain comes through, the alternate airport would be Yarrington. We'll touch down there. And we'll just sit under the wing, let the rain go through. And then hopefully if it clears up, we'll self-launch with the jet. Since we have the night vision goggles, here we are at 6 p.m. We can still take off at night legally. And we got plenty of vision with the night vision goggles to get back, motor back home to Minden, which is probably only 30 miles away. So that hopefully is kind of the plan. And we just never know with this kind of dynamic conditions, you know. So that's kind of the plan.
All right. So we just arrived at the hangar. And actually been here about an hour, just getting everything all set up. I'm learning about the cockpit and the O2 system. And I'm going to be riding in the back seat. And the forecast looks epic. Night vision goggles on here. And I guess roll this thing out of this beautiful hangar. And what are you liking about the weather? It'll be a short day, but I think it should be fun.
You know, we got a quick, really, really quick move in front that's going to be coming through. So I think the earlier we get off, it's tight because the energy is just starting to build now for wave. The winds are up over the ridges at 50 knots already. So we're good to go.
But we're going to be back on the ground by 1 o 'clock because it's going to get pretty nasty in the valley here. But we do have some backups to go east if we can't get back into the valley due to the rain. So we'll try to make a quick, fun flight out of it. And, you know, the key is to let you have some fun today, you know. And experience the whole glider experience in this weird world of night flying with the glider in mountain wave conditions. But it's pretty epic. It's insane. It's really fun. You're going to dig it. Yes, I am. The ship is beautiful. It's got the jet engine out for self-launching. And then we'll tuck that away and go have some fun.
Good morning. Hey, my name's Gordon Betker. I've got a letter of agreement for a sailplane distance record attempt. And per the LOA, I'm just required to call you and let you know that I'll be hopefully talking to you folks here. Departing out of Minden, Mike Echo Victor.
And call sign is November 189. Delta Tango.
And departure will be at already filed IFR. So it should be in the system. And I'll be departing the Mike Echo Victor at the Minden Airport at 11Z right around there.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, see, I'm a glider. So what I'm doing is utilizing mountain wave meteorological conditions to stay aloft. So I launch out of Minden, shut the engine down, and then climb up in mountain wave and then typically request a block of altitude, you know, 4,000-foot increments. And then so the goal today is to try to work up north of northwest Reno about 50 miles in the Susanville area, turn around, and then head basically along the east side of the Sierra on the eastern side down towards into the 2508 complex. And I have a letter of agreement with the LOA. And I'm going to send it to the Joshua folks also for a Sage II clearance. November
189 Delta Tango.
Yeah. Yeah.
Awesome. Yeah. So everything's kind of weather driven, you know, and, you know, we got mountain wave conditions today. So I'm just trying to utilize that to establish the, you know, distance record type thing. So anyway, hope to talk to you. It's 128.8, right? Over.
Okay. So I'm just going to be suited up in the expedition suits, got the night vision goggles on. I'm in the back seat. I'm looking at a bunch of instruments that I don't understand. A lot of crap in my head. And Gordon's rolling us out of the hangar. It's all happening. It's about 2.15 in the morning. It says we'll be in the air here about 3 a.m. Hill 300.
The adventure begins. All
right.
So we're out on the dark runway. It's about 3.15. He's just fired up the engine with our
night vision goggles on. The sky looks incredible. It's so weird looking through these things. You see the rotor clouds and the lights of the city and many more stars than you'd normally see with your naked eye. This
is awesome. Yeah.
I tell you, you know, when you're doing, getting ready, you're kind of thinking, why am I doing this? Go through this one. We're on, you know, on top of the mountain, putting all this stuff on and paragliding. You're just layering and layering and layering and then O2 and radio and, oh, I forgot that. You take the helmet off, do it all over again. Exactly. So much stuff. It's an insane amount of work. I'll be on the intercom here. We'll be talking on that in just a sec, all right? Okay. You should be able to hear me.
Flaps set to minus two. They are. Belts and headset on. Spoilers are closed. Double check. They are closed.
Controls free and clear. All
right. Altimeter set. 4720.
Master switch is on. Engine display is on. Check fuel levels. We got that. Fuel full up. Fuel pressure light is on. That'll go out. Turn on avionics. LNX. Okay. Turn off flight loggers. Trim set. Canopy secure. We'll get that. Then fuel shut off valve. Pump breakers. We'll put those in. Pressure light out. And we'll start the motor.
32. 2305 is up.
Winds are calm.
You're going to hear that throughout the flight. Don't worry about it.
03 in. 0330. Okay. I'm starting to fog up.
Okay. Here we go. Pump breakers are coming in.
Throttle is at idle.
Pressure light's out. Here we go. Engine start. With
mountain waves, since you have such strong winds a lot, if you want to like remain stationary over the ground, just point the nose into the wind and you can actually get, right now we've got a 10 knot ground speed. So, you know, if I were to slow up another 10 knots, we'd be actually going backwards. I
think 50 knots is a little too much for a paraglider. Yeah.
A bit.
13. 13.1. 13.2. We've got about 60 knots of wind. I don't know what I'm saying. A little strong. But... Yeah. So winds are 225 at 60 knots right now. Pretty subtly at 60 knots. And
it's a little stronger. Yeah. So for this, down this low, you probably want to see about 40 knots or so. 60 knots.
It's amazing how smooth it is. Yeah. Yeah. Mountain wave is glass smooth, you know, once you get through the rotor. So you got, you got a little taste of the rotor. It wasn't, it was pretty, actually pretty mild. Wow. A couple weeks ago, I just stuck a swan around the cockpit and it almost got rolled upside down. Geez. The
ground speed's 40 knots. Wow. Doesn't seem to work for me. I'm
going to be smoking.
Yeah. I
can't believe how smooth it is. It would not feel smooth. I like this in parallel. Or
maybe it would. You'd just be going the wrong way. Too
far west. Yeah,
right. I can't get the boat.
I see the sun coming. It's only 420. Good
girl. It's over
5 a.m. We're miles north of Mendon. He's been running us right in the wave line, 35
to 24,000. Just getting into the edge of the front. We're approaching Seasonville here and the
clouds below us and you can see all the harmonics with the waves and the big gaps between like rivers. Yeah. And the clouds and the big gaps that go off to the east. I wasn't sure if it was going to work as well up here, but the sky's showing it is. And it is. So we're going to be pushing north.
It's black. It's night. We're going to take the night vision goggles off. But when we have the vision goggles on, you can start to see the sun starting to happen to our east. So we're near
to that. Fighting
a little bit of a headwind.
Riding in the wave. Only 4 grand. Getting the first little reds up to our east in the sun. Coming up. Beautiful sky with the night vision goggles.
Okay. So we just cleared Lake Tahoe and we were ripping along and pushing a bunch of wind, but cruising along really good in the wave, but now we've lost it and we're down to 16.7 and we're making a move to the west, kind of downwind, kind of quartering off against the wind. And I think this is going to be able to climb again and we'll be able to carry on south. Just saw the most spectacular sunrise. Yeah. Maybe. Ever. Not beautiful. So this is really, really outrageous. My feet are a couple blocks of ice, but otherwise we're pretty comfy up here. We both just had a big long pee into a bag and see what we
get. We've been in the air for about three and a half hours.
All right.
So to wrap it up, we took off just after 3.30 in the morning and flew just under seven and a half hours. After a couple of big loops, big high G loops there at the end, he put down the flaps and pointed it straight at the ground because the storm was coming in pretty quick. We knew it was going to arrive by one, but it ended up arriving a little bit early, right around noon. So Gordon put her down nice and smooth in over 35 knots of wind. It was pretty rough going back down through the rotor when we got down underneath the wave. Top speed was 256 knots, which is just shy of 300 miles an hour.
Max altitude was just below 24,500 feet, which we maintained for an awful long time on that final leg when I had the stick, which was pretty fun. The top max climb on the Averager was just under nine meters per second. And yeah, the winds at the top of Slide Mountain got up over 85 miles an hour at one point. So it was cooking. That's the mountain right there, Mount Rose. It's a ski area. I grew up ski racing on that mountain and that was just north of where we took off. So it gives you an idea of what these gliders can fly in. Pretty rowdy, except when you're up in the wave and then it's nice and smooth.
We were both totally exhausted and had the screaming barfies when my feet came back to life. But we were home by lunch. And had a nice nap and then a gorgeous dinner. And the next morning it was up early and back to the airport and home. Almost seems like a dream. A dream I'd love to live over and over again. Glider stuff is pretty exciting. And a very special thanks goes out to Matthew Scudder at SkySight. SkySight has been an incredible model and getting better and better all the time. Built specifically for soaring, but we're obviously using it a lot more for hang gliding and paragliding these days around the world. But it costs a lot of money to keep that server going. And typically Matt shuts that down in the evenings because people don't fly in the evenings.
But Gordon does and they do in wave. And so Gordon and Matthew have become pretty good friends. And he reached out before this flight and said, hey, can you keep it running all night? Matthew said, sure, of course. And we can download all that data before we get in the airplane. And needless to say, the models just nailed that. Whenever you're kind of wondering, should we go over there? Should we go more west or more east? Just look at SkySight. It's got it right there for you. So thanks, Matt. Thanks for your awesome model. And I hope you all continue to use that more and more. It's an amazing, amazing forecasting tool. Huge thanks to Gordon and his wonderful wife, Melissa, for their incredible hospitality and embarking on these crazy flights.
I love people like this who are just willing. They're willing to go for it and press boundaries. He really is in a world of his own flying with these night vision goggles. And he's dreaming big. And it was fun to be a part of it. Hope you enjoyed the show. If
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