In a recent post, Doug Keller posted some pictures from the 1980 national championship. One of them was of me with beer poured in my hair to celebrate setting the Canadian duration record. I went back to my logbooks and found my log book entries for that flight.
At that time of that flight, there was no official Canadian log book. I used a surveyor's notebook because it was sturdy and with good quality paper. Many of us wrote at length about our flights, as each one was a huge learning adventure, and a real gift. In later years, I gradually wrote less and less, and eventually only made short entries in an online notebook. But I continued to log each and every flight, not just because it is required by our rating system, but because it was personally meaningful.
When I took up flying sailplanes in 1987, I noted carefully the soaring association's official log book design, and used it as inspiration for the first official HPAC hardcover logbook.
To the reader: did you use to keep a logbook and log every flight? Do you still use a logbook or have you given it up? If the latter, what led to that?
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| logbook entry for Cdn. Duration reccord |
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| 2 Electra-Flier Spirits; photo by Graydon Tranquilla |
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Here is an in-flight photo taken by Graydon Tranquilla. It shows two Electric-flyer Spirits, which were very popular with the Alberta team as Willi Muller sold them. You can get a good idea of how steep the cliff is below the takeoff spot. Launching in strong winds was exciting, to put it mildly.
