Quote:
Originally Posted by AeroMcAeroFace
I did wonder once, about wave lift, because that can go up to incredible heights. Theoretically, commercial airliners could fly along these lift lines and reduce fuel, but the passengers would hate it due to turbulence, the airlines would hate it due to having to take detours, the ATC/legal team would hate it because of the skyway restrictions.
I have never experienced wave lift, but circling in a thermal is certainly an interesting experience.
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Where I live wave lift is damn near impossible to find as we don't have no mountains here.
Only one guy here has ever archived it close to our airfield, and we've got quite a few competitive guys here.
He climbed a steady 0,5 m/s on a wave from an open pit mine.
However as waves tend to rather slow, airliners would still sink in them.
One way of breaking a few world records would be to get up even further to make use of certain global wind systems at high altitude.
But getting there would be quite a challenge as thermals only get you up into the clouds and waves also don't go as high while your stallspeed gets closer and closer to your VNE.