It is not inherently dangerous, it is just terribly unforgiving of your mistakes

Everything in life is risky,  At work I start all projects evaluating risk areas, figuring out the impact and strategies to mitigate it. For fun, I fly light airplanes, skydive and teach others how to do it.

Flying across the Andes on a motor glider is not really that dangerous in itself, it is just one of those activities where you can't do too many things wrong before you are in serious trouble..

With this mindset, we sat to evaluate possible situations that could affect us on our journey. from this brainstorm we came up with the following risk areas and strategies to mitigate the impact of them.  (If you can come up with any others, please tell us, as we would love to know now in the ground!)

Expand - Collapse

• Risk
  • Crew
    • High Altitude
      • Suplemental Oxygen
        • Determine usable time range
        • pulse oximeter
      • Low Temperatures
        • Easy on/off clothing
    • Personal Health
      • Train
      • Physical checkup
    • Dehidration
      • Liquids
  • Aircraft
    • Structural damage
      • Ballistic Parachute
    • Engine
      • Failure
        • Glide to safety
      • No Restart
        • Dead Battery
          • Causes
            • High load/time
              • Spare battery
              • Reduce load
            • Blown fuse box
        • Cold Engine
          • Evaluate
  • Environment
    • Weather
      • Risks
        • Severe turbulence
        • Heavy Sink
        • Storms
          • not in season
        • Strong headwind
          • Return to base
          • Alternate landing spots
      • Mitigate
        • Obtain Forecasts
        • Collect info from previous flights
        • Real time info
    • Terrain
      • Research posible land-out spots
        • Talk to people familiar with the area
        • Google-earth, Topographic charts
        • Determine L/D required
      • Determine critical stage points
        • Point of no return
        • Return to base
        • Dead zones
  • After landout/crash
    • Call help
      • Satellite rescue system
        • Only for Ok/Not ok messages
        • Gps Coordinates
        • Every 10 minutes messages
      • Celullars
        • near populated areas
      • Aircraft radio
        • may reach comercial planes above
    • Survive
      • Low temperatures
      • High altitude
      • Food
      • Water
    • Self Rescue
      • First aid
      • walking distances

A thousand mile journey starts with the first step.

It is Jan 25, 2014,  a shiny summer day here in Peru. The sky is clear, light winds and a beautiful plane in the hangar ready to go.

The purpose of today's flight, our first into the valley..  is to explore the terrain and soaring conditions in the Chilca valley in the coastal region of central Peru. The valley we will be flying up on runs east to west all the way from the top of the Andes until it reaches the ocean on the beach.  Within 10 miles of the coast the valley is about 4 miles wide surrounded by mountains that progressively grow higher and narrower up to 20'000 feet. (At about 60 miles in)

Neither Tati nor I have flown on this area before, so we will go slow and with plenty of altitude for about 10 miles into the valley where the surrounding mountains reach 6000ft msl. The main idea is to fly at a constant power/speed setting, record the climb rate and use diferentials to figure out areas of sink/lift and with luck find out workable lift spots.

We surveyed the area carefully on Google earth and topographical maps, but on this sources our main risk are almost invisible power line cables that might run from one mountain to the other. For this reason we will stay at least 100 meters over the tops of the mountains.

The flight went on with no surprises, the climb to 6000ft assisted by the engine, then we shut down  and safely glided down to 2000ft before we re-started the engine.

* After we shut down the engine, we always stayed within a 11:1 glide ratio to our established safe land-out area

As the graph above shows, during glide we found some areas of lift but not wide enough to work them with the sinus for long.

We had fun!

* At about 2 miles inside the valley, we saw several lines of high voltage power cables crossing the valley from north to south. The lines never crossed directly from mountain to mountain, but kept the height of the towers over the mountains (About 30 meters from the terrain)