The greater Kagel area (W. Towers to way East) always seems to have certain areas (usually ridges) that kick off usable lift and certain areas that don't. I thought of a way to capture and draw this data.
Basically I did some post processing on the gps data from my vario.
The real way to look at this is to navigate and zoom in 3D in Google Earth, but I have a couple screen shots and happy to email and/or post if requested.
First Picture. Last week's flight (not very good day) using the normal free tools (Google Earth, and GPS Visualizer). The flight is plotted with different colors for height. For many this would be trivial and not novel, but mentioned here for comparison of the second picture.
Second Picture. But if you were to plot all the trajectories, it would be a big hairball. My preprocessing method removes all but the good lift/sink. A composite of data for all my flights in 2007 with areas of sustained lifted in blue and sustained sink in red.
It would be interesting to compare with someone else's flights from Kagel.
Also, this could be a great flight preparation exercise before flying at a new site (Owens, flatlands, etc) if some of the GPS flight data has been preserved.
Just let me know if you want me to email the pictures and/or post.
Best regards,
Chad
Lift/Sink Profile for Sylmar Area in 2007
Moderator: Chip
