86: Cross Country Soaring In the Canadian Rockies: An Interview With Patrick McMahon

Today our featured guest pilot is Patrick McMahon, Patrick is a Canadian cross country soaring pilot and flight instructor located in Alberta Canada. Today he flies at The Cu Nim Gliding Club, having learned to fly with the Royal Canadian Air Cadet Program, and learned to soar in southern Ontario at York Soaring Association.

During the week Patrick manages various energy efficiency programs across Canada, with an emphasis on residential retrofits. Soaring is an extension of this work as he considers it "energy efficiency as a sport". 

He is an advocate for the sport in Canada, maintaining the social media properties of the Soaring Association of Canada, has served for over a decade on the volunteer boards of his respective gliding clubs, and is a co-founder of the Proving Grounds - an automated task scoring and ranking platform intended to turn glider pilots to soaring pilots in 3 simple steps.

Patrick co-owns an LS6-b "EH", but will fly anything he can when the weather is pleasant and there's a willing tow pilot!

Later on this episode we hear another great Soaring tale from author and glider pilot Dale Masters. 

We than head to Blairstown New Jersey for our Tips & Technics segment and catch up with blogger and CFIG Daniel Sazhin. Today we will talk about the importance of being trained on how to handle landing out and one of his recent interesting experiences when he had to do just that. 

We then wrap up the podcast with our soaring safety segment with Gary Kemp. Gary has flown gliders for over 40 years and has logged more then 4,000 hours in the cockpit. He will share with us some personal experiences that he has learned from that can help you stay safe to fly another day. All this now on episode 86 of Soaring the sky.

www.soaringthesky.com

www.cunim.org

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http://soaringtasks.com/