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)