Kevin Carter <<xckevinc>>
writes:

Making the most of my time on lockdown I came up with something
cool I thought was worth sharing.

Years ago an ace PG pilot Mike Jobin put together a KML file with a long list of
possible LZ's, and most importantly, do not land areas up and down the Colorado
Front Range.  I made a quick converter to generate an Open Air Airspace file
from that data so I could load it on my Naviter Blade.  Now I can see and avoid
the DNLs (do not lands) while exploring some of these routes for the first time.

Just in case my head is really far up my a-- anytime I'm in the air, I also set
Airspace altitudes so the warning alarms would alert only when appropriate.
Airspace floors were all set to SFC (surface). All the ceilings were set
proportional to the airspace size.  I set the ceilings to SFC + width divided by
10 for a conservative 10 to 1 glide ratio.  So if the alarm goes off for a big
DNL area like our local state park, turn around because you won't be able to
glide to a good field out the other side!  That is important here because in
most cases there isn't a clear visual indicator for those boundaries. Everything
is brown and looks landable.  On the flip side, with altitudes set this way, you
don't hear a peep from airspace alarms when thermaling or gliding high over DNLs
that aren't a factor.

I included a screenshot of what it looks like on my map page. DNL's are defined
as type R in the Airspace file and I left that colored blue on my Blade.
Landable fields are defined as W which stands for wave window so I set my color
to green for those. Lastly, emergency PG only LZs are type Q and colored yellow.