[reluctantsparrow]

I guess I got off the MHG focus but I have another trick that might be helpful to some concerning spot landings that again uses pretending.
I PRETEND i am an osprey and the grass in front of the spot is water and there is a fish in the water a certain distance in front of the spot.....I know it sounds crazy but it works for me amazingly well.
I use my left brain on approach to set up the proper angles relative to the desired spot, which is now the fish and not the actual spot, I also use my left brain to make sure my final approach is directly into the wind to not be drifted right or left, but then I switch to right brain function and pretend I am an osprey that is going to snatch that fish up out of the water.
the most important thing an osprey does is NEVER take its eyes off the spot...never. Even on the downwind and base legs of the approach. I am an osprey and that is my dinner...I never take my eyes off my dinner and I let the intuitional right side of my brain tell me when to turn onto baseleg, then final.....it works really good for me...I snatch the imaginary fish from the water and then glide a few feet farther to land on my ....nest....which is the actual spot....
What this does is take the fear of missing out of the equation.....ospreys do not have this fear of missing....and when I am pretending I am an osprey neither do I.
It also removes the bystanders and lookie-loos from my consciousness and any fear of not doing good with all those people watching goes away as well. They cease to exist when i pretend I am an osprey.
this removal of fear frees up a lot of brain space, especially when the subtle fear of missing the spot is no longer present.
the fear of missing can be best illustrated with a story...
I once returned from an all day adventure with a friend of slogging through waist high snow in the Cascade range without snowshoes. unknown to myself, this all day adventure had put me what I call....the zone....or....the peace pool....
I arrived at another friends house for dinner later that night where we have a tradition of wadding up our paper napkins after dinner and tossing them into the wastebasket. There were six people present at this dinner.
the host finished his meal, wadded his napkin, and gave it a toss from about 13 feet away and missed.
I knew he had missed even though I sat with my back to the wastebasket because I heard the sound of the napkin bouncing off the rim and landing on the floor.
I wadded my napkin and started to turn to try my luck when I suddenly realized, looking at that wadded up napkin, there was absolutely no possibility of missing. i was in the zone.
I realized my brain already knew every angle of that room, every obstacle between myself and the basket, and the exact location of that wastebasket and less I thought about it the better....let the right side do all the caculations....so
I never turned to look. I simply tossed it over my shoulder from a distance of about 15 feet with several obstacles including a high bar and hanging cupboards and It was a swish.
The friends sitting accross from me who could see the whole thing were shocked and exclaimed,...that was a lucky shot....but my other friend knew better. He knows what the zone is and he saw it on my face so he retrieved my napkin and set in front of me for a second toss. I still had not turned around to locate the wastebasket. i still felt no fear of missing. i simply picked it up and tossed it over my shoulder.....swish a second time.
My friend pulled it out of the wastebasket again.....and again set it in front of me...and again.....a third swish...
Now, what I call....the dogs.....were closing in on my brain.....the dogs are those little voices that say things like....oh...this is special....or...I HOPE i can keep this up....they were trying to drag my ego into the game.
The dogs are those little voices that plant doubt....and sure enough....my fourth shot bounced off the rim....
My friend was not turned off by that one miss and retrieved the napkin for the fifth time and my fifth shot, still not having turned to look at the basket even once, was again a swish but in my mind I was fighting off those ....dogs...that were planting doubt in my mind saying stuff like....oh...look at you...arent you special?
My friend retrieved the napkin a sixth time, set it in front of me, and I just shook my head....no....the dogs voices in my head were strong now.....there was no way I was going to make a sixth shot.....
This was not magic. And this is not bragging. This is what all our minds are capable of without the fear of missing and I am only sharing to make that one point. It is actually the fear of missing that usually causes us to miss.
this can be applied directly to take offs and landings...
Why dont we ALL run full tilt when we know a fully committed run is what we need for a strong and safe launch? It is usually some subconscious chatter planting fear in our minds that keep us from doing so.....
I overcome this fear by pretending I can run all the way to the bottom of the hill, even if directly below launch is a clearcut filled with stumps and brush.....

[reluctantsparrow]

I have noticed a....chatter...on approach where my left brain, the rational, calculating side of my brain, tries to argue with the intuitional, right side of my brain.
It argues about when to turn onto the base leg, it argues about when to turn onto final, etc.
It GUESSES about these decisions where my right side, intuitional seems to KNOW.
I have to actively ignore the left side and trust the right side completely and not second guess it for the osprey technique to work properly.

[Dayhead]

The Albatross can soar dynamically for weeks at a time. It puts one half of it's brain to sleep and flies using the other half.

I wonder if there's any arguments during shift change.

[Bill Cummings]

The Albatross can soar dynamically for weeks at a time. It puts one half of it's brain to sleep and flies using the other half.

I wonder if there's any arguments during shift change.

Wow! I can really appreciate the difficulties scientists overcame monitoring these bird brains while in flight, at night, over the middle of the ocean.
(wait a minute --- this is July 1st --- is this a late April 1st post?)

[KaiMartin]

The Albatross can soar dynamically for weeks at a time. It puts one half of it's brain to sleep and flies using the other half.

I wonder if there's any arguments during shift change.

Wow! I can really appreciate the difficulties scientists overcame monitoring these bird brains while in flight, at night, over the middle of the ocean.
(wait a minute --- this is July 1st --- is this a late April 1st post?)

In-depth scientific article on birds: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-006-0120-3
( "Do birds sleep in flight?", Niels C. Rattenborg, Naturwissenschaften, September 2006, Volume 93, Issue 9, pp 413–425 )

The author discusses quite a number of hypothesises like the sleeping half brain and several likely candidates for sleeping on the wing. However, there seems to be no hard evidence for sleeping in the air. On the contrary, there are hints that birds don't. E.g. albatrosses generally spend several hours of the night on the water even when they are on their way back to their nest to feed their chick. It would be clearly advantageous if they could keep on flying. Yet, they don't. Other birds who have to cross a long distance over water during migration happily take a nap after the long haul rather than feed.
So the answer to the question according to the author is "We don't really know. But chances are that birds don't sleep in flight."

---<)kaimartin(>---

[Dayhead]

I'm happy to stand corrected. It's just a bit of lore that I liked. Can't remember now where I got it.

[Bill Cummings]

I'm happy to stand corrected. It's just a bit of lore that I liked. Can't remember now where I got it.

I did see a National Geographic (I think) narrated by Oprah (I think) that had land birds flying thousand of miles to land and eat some type of critter that crossed the beach at only one day per year. After chowing down they next flew nonstop from far side of the Atlantic to somewhere high in the Arctic Circle above Canada to nest. They had another small open window to feed on something there before things froze up.
As you can tell I didn't learn much from Oprah.

[Frank Colver]

Big article about the albatross in the LA Times a few days ago said that their feathers are not coated with oil, so they cannot land on water. They can scoop up fish without touching the water. If they run out of lift over the ocean they have to flap to stay off the water until they find lift.

They do a lot of dynamic soaring in the winds around Antarctica.

"No rest for the weary".

Frank

[KaiMartin]

Big article about the albatross in the LA Times a few days ago said that their feathers are not coated with oil, so they cannot land on water. They can scoop up fish without touching the water. If they run out of lift over the ocean they have to flap to stay off the water until they find lift.

Luckily, the birds featured in this flickr-search do not read the LA Times
https://www.flickr.com/search/?text=alb ... ter%20bird

Albatrosses are not only able to float on open water. They regularly do so, mostly at night. They even spend hours floating at night even when conditions would allow them to soar dynamically and they are on their journey back to feed their chicks. This is considered circumstantial evidence that albatrosses do not sleep on the wing. See the article by Rattenburg, 2006 I linked to a few days ago.

The description you give fits better to the magnificent frigate bird. But even with them, the jury is still undecided whether or not they actually sleep in flight.

---<)kaimartin(>---