My Flying

The day started off wet, there was a lecture on thermalling and then actual thermalling. Correct, you heard me right. Thermalling at FAUH! The theory all sounds good, that's of course until you try and put that mass of information to practice, then it's a little trickier.

Talking of trickier, I made my first blank panel flight. Not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, both the ASI and altimeter were blanked off for my first launch and the subsequent flight. I found it relatively easy to do medium turns keeping it at 80 km/h and trying to stay in the thermal. The ASI was back for the landing. I also needed to estimate my altitude for the landing which I did ok. I started downwind on 500ft. It should have been 700ft, but a 200ft difference is not bad in my books.

The second flight was late in the afternoon and pretty darn amazing. At one stage we had thermalled up to 3200ft, which by the way, is the highest I've ever thermalled. Cloud base was at about 3800 ft. We flew for 52 minutes, which is also my longest flight in the Twin.

Unfortunately both landing sucked big time and was due in part between a communication break down between instructor F(5) and myself and I seem to have taken a confidence knock in that department. Never-the-less I had 80 minutes of great thermalling equalling 214ZAR.