Pilots and Piano Players

I finally heard from the Englishman who also claimed to be a piano player in a brothel. He said he thought it sounded a lot more interesting than the IT he actually does, so that is why he used piano player as an occupation.

On another note, I checked out another glider website, called SoaringSpace, and have added a link to it in my links area. Gloria is the owner/moderator of the site. The site has a forum used by some of us who prefer "solar/gravity powered" flight. If you aren't sure of what I mean by saying solar/gravity powered flight, I will attempt to give a brief explanation. The various weather systems and associated winds that happen on this planet are caused by heating from the Sun, coupled with the rotation of the Earth. As the Earth rotates, areas which had previously been heated by the Sun, begin to cool off. Different objects heat and cool at different rates, and affect the air around them as they heat and cool. As an object warms up, it also warms the air around it, and as it cools off, it also cools the air around it. Warmer air is less dense than cooler air, and is therefore lighter in comparison to the cooler air. Due to the various geographical features of the planet the air will either flow to a higher elevation as it warms, or flow to a lower elevation as it cools. The resulting mountain breezes and valley breezes or land breeze and sea breeze are the wind. But you might say, there are no mountains where I live, or I am not close to the ocean. Even a slight change in elevation can cause the mountain/valley breeze situation, and a small body of water will still cause some land/sea breeze. When I was flying hot air balloons on a regular basis, I saw the effect of a mountain/valley breeze one morning in Western Oklahoma very vividly. The wind at one thousand feet off the ground had been doing about twenty miles an hour out of the South. I dropped down into a creek area that was at the south end of a horseshoe shaped bowl, that was higher on the North side than the South side. The bowl was probably five miles in diameter. The elevation differential was probably a maximum of two hundred feet between the top of the ridge (using the term ridge very loosely) to the North, and the bottom of the bowl to the South where I was. I was able to move to the South, albeit at an extremely slow pace, for about thirty minutes, due to the fact the cool air was still settling into the lower area. As the Sun continued to get higher, the ground started to warm up, and the cooler air started warming up and would eventually go the opposite direction. As the ground starts to warm up during the day, the air close to the ground also starts to warm up, and become less stable, causing a decrease in the friction between the earth and the layers of moving air above it. This is a very brief over-simplified explanation of part of the reason the wind can be very calm in the early morning, and calm in the late evening, yet be quite breezy during the heat of the day. As a balloonist, I became a micro-meteorologist, and a student of the local geography of wherever I happened to be. As a glider pilot, I have learned to apply the same principles to be able to make a judgement as to the "soarability" of a potential flying site. The most difficult part (for me) of transitioning from being a balloon pilot to a glider pilot, is that many of the various conditions I either find desirable or undesirable when flying a balloon, are the opposite when applied to flying gliders. When flying the balloon I want stable air, and when flying the glider, I desire unstable air.