Archive for December 2011
Memories of Steve (2) The Stevebump
Argentina seems to have a lot of speed bumps. They have all kinds. Big ones, sharp ones, little ones, bolt-ons and more. Each time we have driven over one, Tago has said that Esquel has the worst speed bump. The “Stevebump.”
“Oh no, that’s not a big bump. You should see this one in Esquel. It nearly killed Steve.”
“One time with the glider, Steve and Terry landed in Esquel. They had never been there before. I told them, ‘I’m a local, I know where I’m going.’ But I forgot about this one speed bump. I drove the truck into town with Steve in the back at full speed, right over this huge bump.”
Steve had just come from one of his speed/endurance sailing expeditions and he had injured himself on the boat. He was still in a lot of pain from the injury and a sudden bump would really hurt. Slamming into a speed bump at full speed was not going to be pleasant at all.
“Steve was a great guy. He just groaned when we went over the bump. He could have kicked me off the team right there but he didn’t say anything about it. He was really tough on the important things but he knew that anyone could make a simple mistake like that.”
This is the site of the infamous Stevebump:
Fortunately for us, the bump is no longer there. Perhaps the locals finally got sick of the unsafe conditions that they were able to remove it?
Touring around Argentina
We are gathering lots of information for future Perlan expeditions. We have taken a few side trips to inspect different airfields that we might use in the future.
El Maiten looks like it might be a useful place to outland. The runway surface is very soft, so we couldn’t launch the Perlan 2 glider from here.
Trevelin looks like a better option. Trevellin is a very small town that is laid out around an octagonal roundabout in the centre of town. It’s such a distinctive feature that it is the logo for the town in all of their posters. The tourist information centre standing on the octagon was very helpful.
New video online - DG1001m launch
The Perlan Project 2011 expedition to Argentina has already had some great results in the Andes Wave. On a non-wave day, we have some time to shoot a few videos. Check out this video of the DG1001m self-launcher…
Big Sky in Argentina
Coming from Australia and having flown in the United States, I am used to seeing “big” skies. The kinds of places where multi-terawatts of energy are going up into the clouds and just begging for a glider to siphon off a few kilowatts. [I will always remember seeing the ground just fall away from me in Australia once.]
Argentina is even bigger. We have had a few days now where the thermals were not very exciting. In fact, with a few hours wasted looking at oxy systems and other time-wasters, we launched after 5pm local time, for a 200km local flight. We’re not even trying to fly straight lines and optimise our cross-country distances and 200km disappears under the wings like there’s no effort at all.
Memories of Steve (1)
This past week, I am spending time with Tago. Tago was employed by Steve Fossett almost from the first record attempt. He originally got invloved with the balloon circumnavigation because Tago’s home town (Mendoza) was selected by Steve as the perfect launch point for a round-the-world attempt. [This one was the one where Steve ended up in the ocean near Australia.]
Tago tells the story of when Steve was getting an altitude chamber test from the US air force. They took the chamber up to some extremely high altitude that would render any normal person unconcious. Steve was fine. In fact he was answering questions and behaving perfectly normally.
“Steve, what are you doing to remain concious at this altitude?”
“I’m practicing ‘mountain breathing’.”
“OK, then stop doing that. It’s Friday afternoon and we all want to go home.”