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The first XC flight of my NT2LXS

The preparation for 2016 season started a few months ago – in November 2015 – when I began to inquire about TRITON 2 Light XS – Thanks Steve Nash, Till Gottbrath and Johanna.  Along with the decision to replace the M4 by T2L, I began to focus attention in recent technical articles on topics related to the flight: technical aspects of CCC wings, wings with light weight, mental preparation for flight, meteorology … Cross Country Magazine has been an excellent source of knowledge and reflection on opinion articles and experiences of other pilots. Thanks Bruno Matos, for the reading.

In practice I feel more confident in the decision to have a ccc, more aware, more alert… In fact, I had many expectations, not all of them very positive about XC flight with T2LXS.

The flight starts at take-off, and this Sunday my takeoff was excellent, considering that I missed the brakes and despite some confusion the wing was at vertical, waiting for I organize myself. Incredible for a CCC.

The takeoff, always going up, and for the second time muddle – trying to get into the harness, without success, for a while, and the wing always up … Wonderful, for a small mountain with 150 meters high.

The thermal on the takeoff was strong and turbulent. When climbing up the antennas, probably the thermal coming from the lee side, got me and I had a ghastly asymmetric collapse, more than 60%, and i instantly thought, “Heei, this is not going there with hands up”  and i piloted in a active way. The wing just flew, always with enough internal pressure, and perfectly understandable reactions, which pleased me greatly. I was climbing… At 1300m, with cloud, I decided to go for XC. The flight was going on, with easier to center thermal, and others less so: there was a lot of instability, but there was also much disorganized thermal, with cores hard to find … But there was a spectacular thermal of + 5m/s continues up to cloud base :)   The landscape is flat – flatland but with some very beautiful dams along the way. I flew with speed brake system, perhaps 40% of the flight, and increasingly i feel able to use them and effectively. Sometimes to me already seems strange when I want to use the simple brakes … it seems that I lose accuracy on the sensitivity of the wing….

From a certain point I began to think to be possible to achieve the dream of several years – get to the beach, the south coast, coming from Alcaria Ruiva. But I was starting to feel some fatigue, and suddenly I had the feeling that the air was apparently more turbulent! So I started talking to myself and to the wing to help me realize that what was happening was just fatigue, because the air was getting supposedly more stable, and not the opposite! And suddenly I began to see the beach, but there were still 14 km to go…

Finally I reached the beach with 1200m

And I could celebrate with my friends  what a beautiful Sunday in April

Flight material:

GLIDER – NOVA TRITON LIGHT 2 XS

HARNESS – GENIE LITE XS

PARACHUTE – BEAMER 3

Special Thanks to my dear friend Bruno Matos he let me use his beautiful pictures of this flight

Link to flight: http://www.dhv-xc.de/xc/modules/leonardo/index.php?name=leonardo&op=show_flight&flightID=728366
Link to flight

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