Final Glide Through Lightning - Scary Thunderstorm in the Mountains!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.พ. 2025
- Cockpit view from one of my scariest flights in a glider as I have to cross a line of thunderstorms over the Rocky Mountains on my final glide back to the airport - conditions are quickly deteriorating and there are now many storm cells with rain, lightning, thunder, and hail in the area that I am looking to navigate around, while also trying to stay within safe gliding distance of landable airports or fields.
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The video depicts the third leg of a flight on July 31 2020 during an attempt to complete my first-ever declared 750km task. It starts just as I am about 430 km into my task, having made excellent progress with an average task speed of 125 kph. So far I have kept my hopes for a successful task completion alive.
But now it is quickly becoming obvious that I will not be able to complete my task and must shift my focus to safely returning home to Boulder. My flying buddies are in similar situations as we seek to advise one another on the best course of action to take.
The video provides a cockpit view of the flight with detailed commentary about the critical decisions along the way so viewers can consider their own choices. I also added some commentary at the end that discusses how and when I might have been able to avoid getting into this situation to begin with.
Seeing the lightning right in front of the canopy amplified my stress level, which was already high as I tried to weigh the decision whether to continue or try to hold and wait for the storm to pass through. I can now say from experience that high stress levels really do limit one's cognitive abilities, especially with respect to complex tasks such as piloting a plane. (Look up Yerkes-Dodson Law.) Deep breathing can help reduce the stress and bring it back to a level where one can function well.
This flight was about 1 1/2 years ago and I was long unsure about whether to publish this video at all. I ultimately decided to do it because I think there is a lot to learn from this flight. If it helps anyone become a safer pilot this would far outweigh any harsh criticism that I may get.
Editing disclosure: I did not hear the thunder claps following the lightning flashes that you can see on screen; I added these sound effects to emphasize the psychological impact that the lightning had on me. The video is as recorded by the GoPro camera mounted inside the cockpit on the right side of the canopy. I slowed down the play back speed of the video during the lightning flashes to make them more visible.
My glider is a Ventus 2cxT 18m high-performance sailplane from Schempp-Hirth. The flight originated and ended at Boulder Municipal Airport (KBDU) - an ideal soaring location for exploring the sky above the Rocky Mountains.
All music is from Epidemic Sound.
The full flight trace can be found here: weglide.org/fl...
Greetings! I am a 76 year old former sailplane pilot ( Life changes ended my solo flying) with 20 years experience and about 900 hrs, mainly in high performance aircraft. I want to thank you for what you are doing with your films! Most sailplane videos on TH-cam are nothing more than pretty pretty pictures featuring people that love to show all the places most will never be able to visit.... Your films are exactly what it is to fly challenging tasks over amazing landscapes. Your presentations are real, engrossing views into what it is really like to fly cross country tasks in breathtaking weather. Your flights put me right back in my cockpit, with all the joy as well as the very tense times we all experience if you have ever headed out over nasty terrain to complete a task. When you are struggling to center that weak thermal that is barely there... I have to keep telling myself to relax as I lean into the turn with you! So many memories of conditions that I to have faced... You got me, keep em coming! Former 9V, out!
9V, thank you so much for your comment and feedback. It makes all the hard work of putting these videos together worthwhile! Thank you!
@@ChessInTheAir I watch my TH-cam on my main tv through Xfinity.... I have to come into the office leave comments, but be assured, I am going back through everything you have posted over the years...... Stay high and fly fast!
Some tense moments there.
epic outro music was definitely justified!
Wow, I just finished holding my breath for you! Great storytelling. This reminds me of Namibia but with terrain. Makes you realise just how tiny small you are in a glider among these enormous storms. Very sobering.
great ride❤
Now THAT'S what I call reality tv! Riveting. And so educational and interesting too. I had my google map on my second computer screen to keep up with where you were geographically (didn't know where some of those landmarks were). Thanks Clemens!
Wow. What an adventure. Thank you for sharing !
I have seen a few of your videos and I must say that they are awesome!!! I really hope you can continue bringing these type of videos. The thing that I appreciate most it's the way you make the viewer fly with you, understand what are you seeing, what is your interpretation of the situation and what are your decisions and when you take them. For someone like me, just starting, your videos are a source of knowledge and entertainment. Keep on the good work.👌
Many thanks for your kind comment! Good luck on your soaring journey!
This video had me on tenterhooks😬. I've followed the flight with Google Earth to give an overall picture. I have to say I've learnt a lot. Happy landings😀😀😀
Thanks Mark, great to hear!
Danke für das Teilen. Es hat Erinnerungen an Boulder vor 32 Jahren zurückgebracht.
Das freut mich! Die Berge sind ja immer noch die gleichen, und das Wetter wohl auch :-)
Very interesting experience, very educative .. thanks for sharing the video while sharing your process of decision making .. !
Thanks for sharing your experience Clemens! It is very insightfull. I am a big fan of your channel. Keep it up!
j'apprécie beaucoup ces vidéos. merci. la stratégie de vol est quelque chose qui se développe avec la pratique sur le long terme, mais avec tes vidéos on peut mieux se rendre compte de ce que ça représente.
Merci beaucoup, je suis heureux que la vidéo te soit utile :-)
Great Video to watch. Had similar experiences in the Alps. Even watching from my armchair it works out the glut muscles. I'm sure you know the saying- it's better to be on the ground wishing you were up there than to be up there wishing you were on the ground. There's nothing like seeing lightening at close quarters to heighten the senses. Keeping as calm as possible is key- you did this well.
Indeed! It sure wasn't easy to stay composed!
Best one yet :) I appreciate your transparent decision making and thought processes. We often encounter thunderstorms here in Tahoe, and learning how to objectively analyze the situation is critical to safe flying! This is a great datapoint to see how others evaluate conditions
Many thanks for the kind feedback, Alex. Would love to fly in Tahoe someday. Sounds like it's at least as technical as Boulder - especially the return to the field at the end of the day ...
Nice looked a little scary 👍
I like your channel and explanations.
Enjoyed that!
Nice work, that was quite some weather!
Thanks, Tim! Indeed. By the looks of your videos I know you’ve been there ;-)
Very exciting! Thank you for putting in all the effort in making these video's. They're really helpful for new and aspiring glider pilots like myself.
Glad you like them!
I really liked the coordination between you and KW which shouldn't be overlooked. On long final glides into sketchy conditions insights from a different vantage point are critical to keeping everyone safe. Another great vid is on the books.
Yes, it’s nice to fly with friends who always try to help each other out.
Even after you committed to Boulder it seems like you always kept good alternatives at the ready, so good job on that and for keeping your head. I like your "Just fly the glider" attitude since that's not the time to worry about how you got into the situation.
Thank you Melinda!
Really well done. Great footage, commentary, and music track. Absolutely top notch, thank you!
Thanks for the great feedback! Glad you enjoyed it!
That was a very exciting video to watch! 😯
However, what stands out for me is your good decision making, prioritising on safety above all else, and also good teamwork with other pilots to use all the information available to make it back home safely.
For these reasons, I believe that you and your club are *great ambassadors* for the sport of gliding. 👍
Thanks Johan! That's very nice of you to say. Yes, we have a very good group of excellent pilots here. It's a lot of fun flying together and helping each other out.
@@ChessInTheAir That is wonderful! I do hope when I eventually join a club, my experience will be the same.
My gosh man that was epic & riveting! The production was fantastic & an enjoyment to watch, Thank You!
Thank you Leo! I put quite a bit of effort into this one to make it entertaining as well as informational. I appreciate your feedback!
@@ChessInTheAir your efforts are fantastic, it must have been a huge editing process but the results speak for themselves. Cheers!
Very very good video!! And a bit scary too... I imagined myself in your place... Phew!! I really appreciate your written comment about your own thinking. Please continue... and thank you
Glad you enjoyed it!
The videos are always appreciated... Thanks for sharing.
Thanks David!
OK, Clemens, here is my comment: WOW. I was at the edge of my swivel chair. Your audio-visual production added so much excitement. And as always, your commentary is supremely educational. - Raul "DM"
Thanks Raul! I know you're very familiar with this area. Look forward to seeing you up there next season!
That was the most tense vid I’ve watched on YT.
It is interesting how a target becomes an imperative when it is in actual fact the last resort, the very last chance. Get that wrong and you’re a pancake. Declining those survivable options instead of accepting them is a true gamble. Was it the hassle of retrieving an out-landing that influenced the gamble?
Hi Josephine, thanks for commenting! I think it shows that my choice of music was effective ;-). Joking aside, it was a tense flight but I don’t think that there was a dangerous gamble involved. I had viable land out options until I decided to pass up Lemon’s field at the very end and commit to the airport. At that point the only risk in my mind was whether I would have the altitude for a regular landing pattern or an alternative pattern from the south side of the airport. If the sink had persisted that would have been my go to option. As it was, the sink stopped and I had more than enough altitude to fly a regular pattern. So why pass up these other landable fields? Landing in a field is not risk free. There’s a possibility of tall vegetation that can result in a ground loop which may break the glider’s tail boom; there is a risk of unexpected obstacles in the field such as rocks, equipment, or a fence that wasn’t there when I last checked out the field before. Landing at an airport is always preferable so my practice is to land at airports whenever that is safely possible. Had I been 500 feet lower when passing Lemon’s field I would have landed there and not gone for the airport because reaching the airport would have truly been a gamble at that point. One must never gamble with their safety, least out of convenience. I completely agree with you on that! If you’re curious you can look up this article that I wrote a few years ago that goes deep into this subject: chessintheair.com/does-soaring-have-to-be-so-dangerous/
Thanks for your considered reply. Here in Uk we refer to small prepared landing strips as airfields. I’ve noticed that Americans call any official landing strip an airport. (Bit of hyperbole in the eyes of us Brits). However if you meant a typical ploughed farmer’s field or meadow, that corrects my original perception.
It certainly would have been lonely up there surrounded by dark clouds, with cells of rain and dust.
@@josephinebennington7247 Yes, semantics can be an issue sometimes ;-) I used to live in the UK some time ago so I would not be surprised.. In this case that’s not a factor though. Both the terrain and the soaring conditions are very different from the UK. Along the route shown in the video there are neither airports nor airstrips. Not one that’s landable in a glider. And most of the land below, even the few areas that are flat, have never been farmed. It’s just high desert terrain. I have personally spent many days researching potentially usable landing spots on Google Earth, and have then visited the most promising spots on the ground to either validate or invalidate them. The usable ones are in my landout database with exact coordinates that I all verified. In most our area you can’t just pick a landable place from the air, you have to positively know whether you can land there. Eg, during the last 30 miles of the flight the only landable spots are at the base of the foothills that are to the right of my flight path. That area is called Rocky Flats. It has its name for a reason. There’s no farming, just a flat area with rocks and lots of holes in the ground created by an abundance of prairie dogs. (Little rodents, not actual dogs.) There are two or three spots there where you can land a glider safely under most circumstances. Fortunately I know where these spots are. But even then there’s no guarantee that those spots will be usable on the day of the flight. The last landable field I passed is Lemons’s field as mentioned earlier. This used to be a private airstrip many years ago. It is now just a hayfield with a wind sock. When the hay is high, a landing can easily result in a ground loop. We regularly check whether the field was recently plowed but I was not sure about that on this particular flight. I’m just sharing this so anyone else reading these comments can see what effort goes into the preparation of cross country flights in our area. On the flip side, the soaring is excellent, we routinely have cloud bases higher than 18,000 feet which is the maximum altitude we’re allowed to fly at. The thermals are very strong and you can glide in straight flight very long distances before you reach the ground, often 100km or more. It is an amazing playground but also quite technical. Hope this is helpful!
You’ve certainly got a much bigger country with wide expanses of untamed land in which to get lost, or at least concerned.
Thanks for your informative replies.
thank you for sharing, even if I only do paragliding (for now?) your videos are not only very informative but also inspiring.
Thanks! We have a bunch or former hang glider and paraglider pilots in the club. The common theme seems to be that at some point folks like to move on to an undercarriage with suspension, aging knees become a concern at some point.
Thanks for sharing! 👍
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great movie Clemens. I noticed a lot of German style name of places on the flight in. Glad you are safe!
Thanks! Yes, there were quite a few Germans and Austrians among the early settlers in Colorado. Mountains are magnets for those who grew up in them. :-)
@@ChessInTheAir great to hear that as a Dutchie. Thanks for taking the time and look forward to the next movie. Happy and joyfull holidays!☃️🌡🌲
Thanks so much for making this great content and taking us so much deep in the details of decision making. To follow your experiences is a really great to learn and to train own gliding skills. I hope one day I can make it to Boulder! With best regards from Berlin!
Hallo Christoph, danke für das nette Feedback! Fliegen in den Rockies ist echt toll. Würde mich freuen wenn du mal zu uns über den Teich kommst :-)
Well, that scared the **** out of me. Given that this has been up for a while, and the time that has passed since the flight, your now much greater experience level, and the Rifle microburst accident... do you have any fresh thoughts on what you would do now in a similar situation. Especially re. waiting out at altitude or diverting to Granby?
Very good question. I have become more cautious with weather. I think the direction of the weather development that day was somewhat predictable earlier in the flight and that was the time when I should have made a different decision. The choice between Granby or going home when I had to pick, I really don’t know if I would make a different decision based on the information I had. It didn’t look as bad from my vantage point and I don’t think the extra experience would cause me to decide differently at that juncture.
Weren't you flying a bit fast at the end, with wet wings and when worrying about arrival altitude? Or was that the correct STF for the sink and wind speed you had (can't really see the instruments well enough)?
Yes, I think you’re right that I was flying a bit too fast in the rain - around 80 kts. Probably too fast despite the headwind and sink. My instruments don’t know the impact of rain on the wings and I was unsure what the best SFT would be. Probably slower based on what I learned since. But it’s really hard to guess. Do you know of a method to work it out in the rain?
very good video and flight. had a similar experience myself. long story. happy ending though!
Thanks Steve, glad it worked out well for you too!
I don't understand why gliders do not have a small motor for emergency situation. Like the glider ratio wouldn't be an issue during an emergency if there's a motor that can last 15 mins
Many gliders do and even mine does :-). But these engines produce quite modest climb rates and can be more of a liability then an asset when you encounter major sink as is always possible when the weather is very dynamic. Eg, let’s say the gliders climb rate with the engine running in still air is 200 feet per minute and you encounter sink of 600 per minute. Even with the engine running you’re still going down fast. But what’s even more important is that with the engine extended you can only fly very slowly which means you will be in sink much longer because you can’t speed up to get out of it. And in our high altitude environment a climb rate of 200 ft per minute is quite optimistic. The airport is at 5300 ft and the density altitude on hot summer days is typically close to 8000 ft. 3000 ft above the ground we‘re now at a density altitude of 11000 ft. These engines don’t climb very much at all at these altitudes. Things are a bit better with electric engines because the performance doesn’t degrade as much with altitude (only the prop becomes less efficient). Some gliders also have little jet engines and they can fly faster. But these jet engines are not super reliable after a flight in very cold air at high altitudes and may not start at all. There’s no perfect solution to these problems, at least not yet. Thanks for your comment.
@@ChessInTheAir Thanks for the reply. As I am not an expert on aviation in general, the drawbacks that you mentioned were not known to me. It appears that glide vehicles require better engines in order to improve the reliability of the engine not being frozen in high altitude and better climb rate so that pilots have better chances of survival if they were caught in similar situation.
Whoa, that was mad..subscribed :D
Thanks Luka, glad you liked it.
I want to stop here at 17:45. I want to learn all about flying in and near thunderstorms. I would not keep flying towards that storm
That's the thing when you fly a plane - you can't stop until you're back on the ground. Rule 1 in any difficult situation is to "keep flying the plane"
It “looked like” the mature stage of that storm had passed and was slowly dissipating. The energy in that area was starting to look used up but I was nervous about the sink especially coming in over the foothills. Did the weather improve after landing or did more boomers roll in later?Great videos, keep it up. I have been a big fan of the Bruno videos out of Utah. You take it to another level with all the educational aspects. Thanks
Good observation! The storms continued for a little while but the situation gradually improved. Approaching the storm, my stress level was quite high and it is amazing to reflect on how difficult it was to calmly assess a situation under stress. I kept thinking about the club member who had to ditch his glider in one of the melt-water-cold reservoirs in the foothills because he got shut out by a big thunderstorm. It's really hard to stay fully rational. Thanks for the kind feedback!
Was that an alarm for the air brakes? How common is that in gliders?
Hi Matthew, yes, it is really intended as a “gear warning alarm” to prevent a pilot from landing without extending the gear. The alarm is configured so that it goes off when the pilot opens the air brakes while the gear is in the retracted position.
How are you doing? I see these fires are just a few miles from Boulder.
Thanks for asking. We’ve not been affected, fortunately.
Commitment....
if you fly long enough cross country this will happen one day..... ( been there )
Yup, I’m sure you’re right. One complication we deal with in our terrain is that the next landable field may be 50+ kilometers away. That was never the case where I flew in Europe. The next airport can be even much further away.
@@ChessInTheAir Yes you want to shure to fly the next stretch... 50K. And showers are in general not good for the glide ratio.
Hmmmm, I think that I'm just going to switch back to watching brain surgery videos, they are a lot less nerve wracking.
Ps. I am a 200 hour glider pilot who just can't manage to get enough annual flight time in the north-east. Last year I bought Lee's Ventus 2cxa (I'm betting you know him). It's a beautiful glider but I have yet to try the 18m extensions, next season for sure.
Hi Doug, thanks for the comment! Nice to hear where Lee's "old" glider went :-) What a great machine! You'll love the 18m tips, very easy to fly. I think you'll appreciate the extra span especially when conditions aren't as strong as what we have here in the west.
Get rid of the awful music, be a perfect video then 😜
Hi David, I know music is not for everyone and it’s actually a lot of work to put it in and on top I have to pay for it. How would you deal with the segments when the replay speed is increased? You could remove all sound from those but I know from experience that most viewers quickly tune out if I do that. You could have random vario and wind sound during those segments but those would necessarily not be aligned with the video, which is misleading and does not feel right to me. Or you could speed up the sound too which I promise does truly sound horrible. Other alternatives would be to post the entire flight (now this becomes a 5 hour video that most folks won’t watch), or I could leave out all the less interesting bits but then you can’t see the development of the sky and the energy lines, and viewers would quickly lose situational awareness of where the flight is going. You can see I have given this a lot of thought. There’s of course also the option that viewers who don’t like the sound simply mute the playback ;-). Our musical tastes are clearly not aligned but I’m glad you liked the video :-)
@@ChessInTheAir One of the first things I was going to do was COMPLIMENT your choice of music! Loved how the dramatic themes became triumphant as you reached Boulder. What video editing software do you use? I need to select a new editor because I make what I call CineMusicalMotoEpics (motorcycle rides -- and Colorado is my favorite playground -- set to my favorite rock music) primarily for my own enjoyment but if you care see th-cam.com/channels/RwTBPJzX18QnkD6RjvQShQ.html. So far none of the artists has complained; because TH-cam recognizes them as copyrighted, ads get inserted so I hope those artists are making a few pennies from the handful of views they get from anyone but me and my riding buddies who sometimes appear in them. NEXT: a reply with SOARING content.