My Flying

A very decent winter's day, with some interesting weather resulting in some excellent lift around the airfield. One glider was up for 110 minutes and only returned because it was getting late. This is very impressive considering that the ridge wasn't used and this is the middle of winter.

I had four flights, just to practice circuits and landings. I was a little rusty during the first take off (34R) and flight and my approach was a little off. The next take-off went very well and we found some excellent lift that kept us up for about 25 minutes before I decided to return.

I practiced thermaling with tightish turns, it was very bumpy in places and I found it hard to keep the plane level in a turn. Sometimes it would reach the end of the lift and just fall out resulting in a type of a spiral dive. Going to need more practice here, but I don't think I did too bad, considering this was my first real soaring without too much backseat assistance.

For the third and fourth flights we moved to 26L and the launches went very well with minimal input from the instructor F(5). Climbed out to 1200 feet, did some nice straight and level and efficient flying then landed. Both landings had a crosswind component of about 75° blowing at about 15 km/h. I found it made the landing a lot more tricky as the approach was not in line with the runway and I needed to kick the glider straight before holding off and the touching down.

All four of my approaches were very high and full airbrakes and half way down the runway later we were down. But as they say, rather too deep than too short and into the fence. The last landing was a bit of a muck up, found myself going too slow twice and the instructor needed to seriously help out on the hold off by closing the brakes. The ground handling was also a bit of a disaster and almost resulted in an off road excursion. Things can go wrong very quickly.

A very pleasant day with much learned. Four flights, 37 minutes and 206,60ZAR.