Flying at Mt Coolum

[thevon]

Yesterday Sean, Atmosteve and I had a big fly at Mt Coolum, and it's great! Really excellent place to fly, with an incredibly panoramic view and enormous frontside lift. You park at the bottom on the east side and it's a steep 15 - 25 minute walk to the top. I carried a backpack with the Ozprey and Bat poking out of the top of it and I carried the Reaper by hand. It's a very well used track, lots of walkers and runners using it. I didn't leave the carpark till 3pm, to avoid the midday heat.

The top is covered with small rocks, but there's a layer of miniature scrub, only a foot or so high, over most of it. So you can mostly land without damage ... but if you have a heavy plane and you bonk it in hard, you're gonna make contact with the rocks sometime! For combat foamies etc it's perfect.

The top is a sort of plateau - like your average hill on top, with slopes and ridges in various directions, but it's a bit like a pudding ... apart from a few bits, it's ringed by near vertical cliffs. So when you throw off the top, there's decent lift but when you get about 150m out you hit the big wall of lift! It's great. Huge height, and plenty of scope for aerobatics. It's nice having an expanse of slope between you and the cliffs, so if you go down you're not over the edge.

Naturally Sean and I were desperate to try out the DS potential but in this aspect we were unsuccessful. The wind was SE and there was a nice big dead area over the N side, but there's a dense thicket of bigger trees in the way everywhere. We just couldn't find a place to stand to get a view. Sean even wandered into the bush, keeping his Skua positioned over gaps in the trees - very brave. It looked like the NW side should work but every time we ripped into that area the plane just slowed down for a beautiful soft landing (well, mostly soft). We tried other ridges too, but no luck - the wind was funnelling up the gullies.

I think a big problem with DSing there is the plateau shape ... the dead backside area is behind a gentle slope, so the wind's fairly horizontal over the top since it's a long way back from the cliff lift. But I suspect that there could be some DS potential in a westerly.

Classically beautiful sloping ... highly recommended and well worth the hike!

[sean]

We had a really fun day out. It's a top spot up there and the walk just adds to the enjoyment I reckon. I taped my Skua nd Reaper together with packing tape and carried them under one arm - worked well. As Andrew says lift up there is good especially if you fly over the cliffs. We wandered down and stood near the cliffs at one stage and frontside flying was very fast! Had trouble landing the Reaper actually, it kept coming in too hot. The landing zone isn't terrible kind to a fast heavy foamy but not too bad either. There is DS potential - the trees on the back were dead calm - but there's just no way to see over the back. Highly recommended!

[skyboyken]

Andrew and/or Sean,

how do you think something like a 4m scale glider would go at Mt Coolum? Particularly is there any kind of landing area for something that has good glideslope control but still carries airspeed right down to the ground?

Not that I have any ambitions in that direction myself you understand . Purely theoretical of course.

Ken.

[thevon]

Ken, on the top yesterday we found that if you circled around well to the right, onto the south-west shoulder and turned back to the E, the plane would almost stop in the horizontal air and you could float it down. I reckon it would be OK. You could be unlucky but it should be OK. Don't go too far around the back.

[sean]

Hey ken, I think you'd need to see on the day. In the early afternoon we could float in nice and slow in the SW area, but later the wind picked up and it became quite turbulent back there - very hard to control the decent - one landing with my Reaper it just dropped in like a stone the last coupe of metres, seemed to get pushed down by turbulence. Put it this way, it would have felt like a big risk flying the Bird there yesterday.

[atmosteve]

Had a really great day! But first I had a quick stick warmer at Pt Arkwright then it was up to the top for Mt Coolum with my very humble load-it-up-and-hang-on-there berzerker bee. It was a fairly civilised breeze and lift yesterday though.

The breeze gave us variable east lift of maybe 20+ knots late afternoon, which translated into good predictable lift out ahead of the launch point; cruise out, cruise in, set yourself up, then do whatever you want for a while, go back out, or in, then do it again, or maybe go somewhere else for the hell of it whenever you want. Fun frontside.

I have to say; I thought i was doing well hauling a combat wing and gear up to the top, but then shortly afterwards Sean arrived with two whole gliders, and then Andrew with three!!

Both Sean and Andrew craft beautifully built and presented aircraft, it was a real pleasure to see them carve about the coastal scenery from above.

Hi Ken, for what its worth, there is no way I would launch a 4m scale glider from Mt Coolum, unless I could figure a way to land it on one of the two golf courses below.

[thevon]

Hey Sean and Steve, this is the guys that were on Mt Coolum with us the other day.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYS5XzOyNmc

Pretty sad stuff, hey! You can't see us or the gliders in it anywhere. But I suspect they may have done a rerun after we left!

For those who weren't there; when we were flying on Mt Coolum a week ago a bunch of half-drunk school age guys turned up at the top ... all dressed up in weird clothes, some of them dolled up as girls, & carrying a big boom box. They seemed very keen for us to leave so they could have our spot. But we kept flying so they set up nearby and started playing Karma Chameleon loud and dancing very stupidly (lots of swearing, they were pretty drunk) and one of them was videotaping. Steve heard them mention You Tube so I mentioned it to my kids and Nick spotted this a couple of days ago.

[Vanders]

Thats what lack of ventilation when using Xylene does to you....................

[atmosteve]

Thank god we weren't in the background lol.. Good find Nick and Andrew. ;D

I didnt hear Andrew compliment them on their nice shirts, but he might have.. ;D

[skyzking]

Ive flown there once Andrew, the lift and the view is so good. Its just the climb upto the mountain which kills it.

By the way, i think Mt Coolum may be DS able. I didnt want to try when i went up there as there where some people wondering around the backside, didnt want to get them...