My Flying

Another weekday, another public holiday, another trip to the airfield.

The weather was not looking to be the greatest and the cu’s were low and looked rather lifeless. As usual the chaps from the training schools were keeping the circuit busy and I decided rather to head off in seek of lift than to compete with two helicopters for airspace.

I chugged around the skies for over an hour finding bits of lift here and there. The lift I did find was good, but either it was very broken or my thermalling sucked big time. At best I would get one or two turns in lift and then loose it. I had the motor going the whole time on idle as the wind was pushing me well north east of the airfield. The air was also cold and I made sure to give regular carb-heat.

During this time I decided to discover what was happening underneath the clouds so I chugged up to cloud base, like 2500 feet, and was pleased to find some nice lift. With the motor on idle I managed to get all the way back to the airfield using the lift right under the clouds and only lost like 500 ft from a distance of about 1.5km out.

I then practiced some landings and they went off very well. What was weird is that the wind on the ground was light but there was major turbulence into the ground effect. On one landing about 3 seconds from the flare, the bottom suddenly dropped and I needed to close the brakes to settle the plane and land. And yes, my airspeed was good!

My longest solo flight yet at 85 minutes = 310.20ZAR = ouch.