My Flying

The day started off with a sombre reminder of last Saturday’s accident, when I noticed the wreck of the plane that had crashed, neatly packed in a far corner of the hangar. The previous day some of the members had retrieved the wreck off the mountain and had cleared the crash site of all debris.

It’s a weird and unsettling feeling looking at the bits and pieces of a machine that once gracefully flew the skies and realizing that the sum of its pieces doesn’t necessary make an aeroplane.

Flying started late (14:30) as it took eight of us over 3 hours to assemble the Twin. The damn wings would just not go on. There seemed to be nothing wrong, just that the fittings where rather tight, perhaps due to the high ambient temperature. It was back breaking work, but eventually it was done.

I enjoyed a nice 40 minute soar with instructor F(1) along our ridge, which included some nice thermalling, and practiced one further circuit. All went off very well and just my flaring let me down again. Either it’s too early or I pull back too quick and the nose lifts.

Something I found a little disconcerting, and this is not the first time that it has happened, is that the pilot at the back trusts his instruments over mine and over his and my perception. We started the circuit way too high. I looked down at the ground and said: “Aren’t we too high, let’s extent the downwind”. He let me extent it a bit before saying: “Turn base”. My altimeter read 1000ft. I pulled full brakes all the way through base and then finals and about 500m from the threshold he takes over and side slips the plane, handing control back to me about 20m from the ground.

Later we find that his altimeter is under reading by 200ft. The thing here is that I am trying to rely more on my perception when judging the circuit and less on the altimeter. So this whole side slipping thing could have been avoided if he had just trusted me some more.

One nice flight and one circuit: ZAR147,40.