12/25/2023 0 Comments Glider plane![]() But as far back as the 1930s, glider pilots discovered they could use the powerful updrafts to climb to great heights. Early aviators quickly learned to avoid flying near or under the convex clouds because they are associated with severe turbulence and downdrafts. The presence of the waves are often indicated by clouds that are lens-shaped, or lenticular. With the right conditions, the wave can rise thousands of feet higher than the summit of the mountains. Air is a fluid, and once winds crest over a mountain ridge and roll down the mountain’s other side-the lee side-they push up into a wave. Mountain waves can be compared to water in a stream swiftly running over a boulder. High-altitude glider pilot Doug Perrenod, a Perlan project team member, says the realization was the project’s eureka moment. “I really thought at this moment that this could end up being my life’s work,” he says. He realized that if the waves were associated with enough wind, they could propel a glider to heights previously thought unobtainable. Standing in front of the image, Enevoldson immediately saw the potential to do something unprecedented. Made with LIDAR (light detection and ranging), the image showed what Enevoldson recognized as mountain waves, but these were far bigger and extended much higher than any he had seen before. He recalls walking down a corridor at DLR’s offices near Munich in 1992 and noticing an image tacked outside the office of an atmospheric researcher. That project was canceled, but the work piqued his interest in high-altitude flight. During the golden age of flight research, Enevoldson was a member of the elite community that included Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, and other luminaries pushing the bounds of aviation.Įnevoldson retired from NASA in 1986 and went to work as a test pilot for Grob Aircraft in Germany, where he flew the Strato 2C, a high-altitude research aircraft developed by the German Aerospace Research Center, DLR. He’s also flown one-of-a-kind experimental craft, among them the odd, oblique-wing AD-1 and the X-24B lifting body. He’s piloted dozens of aircraft, including the F-86, F-14, and F-111. The Perlan Project (so named for the pearlescent stratospheric clouds in Scandinavia) is the brainchild of Einar (pronounced “Ay-nar”) Enevoldson, a former test pilot for the Royal Air Force, U.S. This story is a selection from the June-July issue of Air & Space magazine Buy A handful of pilots have “zoomed” fighters or X-planes to above 100,000 feet by using ballistic trajectories like that of an artillery shell, but for level flight, the current record by a piloted aircraft is 85,068 feet, set in 1976 by an SR-71 Blackbird spyplane, the world’s fastest jet aircraft. At such heights, an aircraft can maintain lift and power only if it is very light or very fast. In the rarefied atmosphere 90,000 feet up, the air density is just two percent of what it is at sea level, and about the same air density as on the surface of Mars. The highest known waves rise up over the Andes in southern Argentina and interact with the polar vortex, the giant cyclone of air that swirls around the poles. To get there the sailplane will ride stratospheric mountain waves, prodigious currents of air created by winds that sweep over mountains. When it is ready, Perlan 2 will attempt what no glider-what no piloted aircraft-has ever achieved: sustained flight at 90,000 feet, far into the stratosphere and near the vacuum of space. “It’s killing me not to get up there,” he says, but the glider he’s learning to fly, Perlan 2, is not quite ready. For pilot Tim Gardner, however, the weather is perfect-ideal conditions for high-altitude soaring. Airliners approaching Reno report severe turbulence, and most small aircraft are staying on the ground. Stretching from the California border across central Nevada is a series of cloud lines, like waves rolling toward the shore, accompanied by vicious winds. A broad expanse of brilliant blue sky separates it from another wall of cloud running parallel. The wall runs the length of the ridgeline that stretches south toward the desert cities of Palm Springs and Las Vegas. A wall of cloud runs above the eastern slope of the Carson Range, which looms over the town of Minden, Nevada, about an hour south of Reno.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |