Ground Speed & Wind Speed While Flying a Glider

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Gene; I'm glider flight instructor on behalf of Expert Village. Now we're headed back to the airport at 60 miles an hour against a 10 mile and hour and ahead wind, so our ground speed is approximately 50 miles an hour. How do you know wind speed? I'm just estimating it based on the weather and what I saw on the ground. The higher in altitude you go, the stronger the wind gradient usually is. If it's 5 miles an hour on the ground, the 3000 feet get 10 or 15 miles an hour typically. If you look out over on the landscape, you can see farmers stirring up dust. You can see fires with smoke. That gives you an idea what the wind is doing on the ground. You can see over on the right there there's a tractor working the fields with a dust plumb behind him. That will give you an indication which way the wind's blowing. The wind shock is designed to turn and face into the wind and it's fully extended at 15 knots. so when the wind sock is straight out, then we have 15 miles an hour of wind or more. And it's calibrated to that standard. If it's half way down it's probably 7 miles an hour. If it's straight out it's 15."