IN-FLIGHT cleaning of glider wing with bugwipers
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- Опубліковано 16 лют 2024
- Glider wings work with laminar airflow. Bugs hit the wing leading edge, and trip the laminar flow into turbulent. This decreases glider performance noticeably. Bugwipers are gadgets, that can scrape off dead bugs off leading edge during flight.
Performance decrease due to bugs is most noticeable when circling in a thermal. We do this with minimal speed to keep the turn radius small, usually around 100 km/h (60+ mph). With dirty wing, we might need to add 5+ mph to the speed to stay above stall speed, and climbing performance suffers. Also straight flight performance (glider ratio) might decrease by 5-10 % easily, with some wing profiles even more.
Bug wipers were invented by austrian pilot, H. Pirker, in late 80's. They became widely used by competition pilots in Europe right away. In drier climates they are not needed, as you don't get any bugs over deserts. They are mostly used in competitions or long cross country flights, where even smallest performance penalty means you might lose the competition, or where you would be flying all day with dirty wings.
This is incredible. My mind is blown. I had no idea such a thing existed. Very cool! Gained a subscriber - whatever that’s worth lol
Nice turn bank indicator.
How cool is that 😎
Kristian, today we went flying, early morning it was about -10'sh and then warmed up over zero and the snow melted. There was a lot of mud. We used the winch, but still fun to get out even if it was just circuit flughts.
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I should tell on Jan 1st our club did a flying day (I wasn't there). The clouds were about 800ft AGL and the winch launch took gliders into the "lower part" of the cloud. They got icing on the wings - which was okay.. BUT!!! they also got icing on the tail elevator section. The one glider lost most of his elevator control and landed hard. Nothing broke and no one got hurt (luckily) ... and the day came to and abrupt end.
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We were talking about icing - I thought I should share this with you. You may want to look into some sort of de-icing effort on you tail elevator section.
That's scary! I have landed only few times with ice on the wings (and even then nothing on tailplane), so I do not have any first hand experience of elevator control issues. Maybe carrying some extra speed for flare is needed?
@@krasw We had that exact discussion. On the one hand carrying extra speed seems entuitive, but on the other hand what they discovered is that the ice was on the leading edge of the tailplane and was creating and effect of blowing the air over the elevator. Hence the verdict as to whether going faster will result in:
a. wind reaching the elevator and then the elevator works
b. wind does not reach the elevator and hence going fast will result in hitting the ground harder
I am still not sure what is best idea - more speed or not.
Perhaps if you get icing (at higher altitude) on your wings, pull back on the stick to see if your elevator is affected too. If it is affected and you have altitude then:
1. go faster and then pull back on the stick to see if speed solves the issue.
2. If not, let go of the stick and the plane should level up a little and slow down (c-of-g balance). In which case don't go fast when you are close to the ground.
The key issue here is we had very low clouds and got icing too close to the ground. Keep this in mind when you get icing again... and perhaps let me know. We all want to be safe out there and sharing stories helps.
Regarding original story, I have flown pretty a lot, including stalls, with really heavy load of icing (possible only in 20 minutes climb inside big TCU). It is also possible that you had some ice, and pilot just botched the landing, without these having any causality?
@@krasw Thanks for the response. It is possible he botched the landing... but that is one question I will not ask (nice way to make enemies at my club).
I understand totally.
This is amazing
If you apply a ceramic coating to the gelcoat, you will get an even better effect from the bugwipers
We use polymer wax. Problem is that cleaning and washing wing after each flight wears any coating pretty fast.
@@krasw Ceramic coating is often applied to cars, The coating is hard, hydrophobic and is protected by gelcoat from ultraviolet light
Saw your video on clear the remains of melted ice. Cool! Strange that in our part of the world we don't have a big bug problem that I have heard of. We do get some bugs... but really little and no one has a bug wiper (that I have seen).
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I should tell you that your statement about "a liightning strike inside cloud while cloud flying, it was truly underwear changing experience...." has been a hot topic. That would be terrifying!
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Tomorrow we are actually going to fly using a winch at minus 13 celcius (without windchill). Don't know why I am going to participate.
I wish our season would start too, I can live with -13. Electric socks, Skyboots, every piece of clothing, it's survivable 😉
Have you ever tried using your big wipers on ice build up?
The force that pulls them towards wingtip is so small, that it will get stuck almost immediately with ice. It works for getting rid of last remains of melting ice, but not worth anything else.
Check this out for that melting ice removal: ua-cam.com/video/o6FstC0CRPg/v-deo.html