A last minute SIV adventure in Italy
Nik Valiris
Having heard a little about SIV (Simulation Incident de Vol) "Simulated Flight Incident" in the past but never really thinking I would jump onto a course I thought write down how I got on with Lee following our little expedition to Italy last week.
I am still a low airtime pilot flying since only 2008 after training with Cloudbase so I thought it might be too much for me. I spoke to Lee Bligh, CFI about SIV training as I was working through my Pilot Task book. There are some Advanced Pilot tasks you can’t really cover off in the UK. I did a bit of reading and picked up the wonderful book from Bruce Goldsmith called "SIV Bible". SIV safety courses, not to be confused with acrobatics, are designed to show you how to identify issues and recover from them such as collapses. They build confidence and knowledge and showed me the limits of my capabilities and that of my glider. However most SIV courses can also continue on to acrobatics such as SATs, Wing Overs, Spirals and Helis.
We plotted a plan to tie up with X-DreamFly and Dani Loritz who runs SIV courses in Italy and Switzerland. For those of you know don’t know him, he was the designer of the Team 5 Blue and Green wings and many many more wings prior to them. More importantly he knows his way around a glider. On top of that he has a very deep and technical understanding about gliders and what is and isn’t possible. Lee has also run SIV courses and was interested in how some of the brand new wings on the market react during SIV manoeuvres. I thought I was looking at a course next year but before I knew it the course and flights were booked and we both headed out. On the plus side I now had the benefit of two instructors.
So the venue was Malcesine, Lake Garda, Italy and the course was over 4 days. The location is just wonderful with great weather, amazing scenery wonderful food and a lovely big mountain called Monte Baldo.
The trip out was easy from Gatwick using Easyjet and flights were cheap to Verona and similarly car hire was easy and gets you to Malcesine in about an hour. The hotel (Hotel Ideal) was specially set-up for paragliding with harness hangers in the gardens and had a swimming pool too…yes we were roughing it. All of the briefings were held there in the evenings so we didn’t need to venture far. However we did head out in the evenings for meals as there is such a variety and lovely restaurants by the lake.
That first evening we had a full briefing on the manoeuvres , got kit ready with life vest, waterproofed radios etc. etc. The next day after a full breakfast we had another briefing and then a run up on the cable car to the launch site at 7500 feet at the top of Monte Baldo. This vast and smooth launch area was really easy to ground handle with a steady breeze. There is a restaurant at the top which was handy when it was too windy to launch and a good chance to have some food and chill.
We were slightly unlucky with the weather for the first few days, which was too strong with cloud but some did fly. The UK training and site/conditions assessment comes into play as we have been training and as always we make absolutely sure it’s suitable. These are big mountains and a top to bottom was going to take 20 minutes.
On the day we flew I set-up first with lots of nerves but it was great having Lee who provided lots of additional information and kept my confidence up. I launched my glider first and it was an easy to reverse launch with the Team 5 Blue EN-B wing on the top. The adrenalin in my body at this point was pumping round but strangely it kept me focussed and I calmly launched and headed out from the hill as briefed and towards the lake. I was treating this as soaring on Milk Hill in a funny kind of way but trying to forget about everything other than the tasks ahead and keeping a good lookout. I flew round a little cloud that had developed below me but this wasn’t a problem. I found it strange looking down on thin wispy clouds but they were nothing like the previous days we had seen some big cloud formations. It was very lovely and enjoying all the views before I realised that I would be shortly subjected to lots of falling out of the sky. My nerves kicked in a little again and then I heard Dani on the radio. He is such a nice guy and gentle but straight way of speaking. “Keep on that course Nik” I could hear him clearly over the radio as I headed out and up wind of the landing field which just came into sight from about 4000 feet. Once out into the middle of the lake Dani kept chatting and my nerves disappeared. I was now into the zone and ready.
We started the first one with dynamic pitch control which required lots of break dynamically up and down at the time to get the wing pitching to the point where I was looking down on the wing and it would collapse. The idea is to create a frontal asymmetric collapse. It took two attempts and the second time with my hands beyond the stall point, eventually it went. I heard “crack” and before I knew what had happened I had spun around and everything was back to normal. Wow, no major trauma! Then onto the pulling frontal collapses by pulling on all the A lines again with no drama. Next up was Big Ears with speed bar, which is slightly different to how we do it in the UK but it's the same principal to prevent stalling. The next one was Big Big Ears which is a different technique I hadn't done before and flying with 20% of the wing with speed bar and adding in turns, this was very stable. We finish with "full stall appreciation, which takes the glider to the stall point, as the break pressure drops off and recover. Before I knew it we were back down and into my final circuit into the now looking very small landing field built into the side of the lake. As I have been used to circuits on the winch and Slovenia I got into downwind leg , base leg and finals and was on the ground before I knew it. I was followed by Lee who was just completing his tasks and heading down too.
My hands were now shaking but keen to get up the cable car and do some more. On the second flight Dani left me more to get on with the getting out to the lake and then before I knew it we were into the same pattern. He was straight on the radio as soon as I got out and every manoeuvre again was given precisely. This time we started with B-Line Stall which was amazing, lovely and great sink rate. Vertical decent was between 6-8 m/s without any drama. Quickly we were onto asymmetric collapses. Starting with 50-70% collapses I had to steer a straight course and once performed I was then onto LTF collapses which I am prevented from rectifying the collapse to see what the wing does itself. Amazingly the worst that happened with 50% speed bar applied and a 70% accelerated LTF collapse was 180 degree turn of the wing with a bit of pitch. We finished on more full stall appreciation and he dropped in a last minute big big ears quickly to see how I handled it under pressure as some pull a frontal at this point. By this point my nerves and all that adrenalin had meant I was no longer in a fit state to continue to fly so we chilled by the lake watching pilots drop out of the sky and perform acrobatics.
One thing I noticed was how well set-up Malcesine is for pilots and the fresh water lake. There are lots of speed boats who race out to pick up pilots within seconds of a landing in water and bring them back, so it is the most safe environment to train you will ever get.
The next day we had plans. Lee was going to do some Heli acrobatics, deploy a new designed square reserve and land in the lake. I was going to do some spins / recovery, full stall and pull my reserve into the lake. We got to launch and it was blowing strong and too strong to launch, so we went hiking instead and descended the mountain with our gliders which was probably the most dangerous part of the trip.
It was a great experience and I will definitely be going back to complete some manoeuvres and try some acro. I would also recommend it to all CP or P rated pilots because you can't get a safer environment to experience your glider. There were pilots with 18 flights post-CP experience who attended from overseas schools and they were in very safe hands.
Quick video of the trip is here:
...and the manoeuvres here:
A great e-book on the iPad is Bruce Goldsmiths book called "The SIV Bible".
Nik Valiris
Mob: 07549 527301