My Flying

Each Sunday at 9 am the duty crew arrives timeously at our small gliding club; their mission: to get the gliders out of the hangar, prepare the winch and to get things ready for the day. The photo to the right is of them working their little hearts out, the time is 10 am. By 11 am little had changed.

Fortunately for my blood pressure I wasn’t too hassled, an instructor had arrived and I needed to complete a few exercises in the Falke as my MGPL is only a flight test away.

We took off and flew for 50 minutes. In that time we practiced incipient spins, steep turns, in flight emergencies and forced landings. The forced landings were very interesting as it involved us flying around the airfield and discussing various options if we had needed to put the plane down. We then returned to the airfield where we again practiced forced landings, but on the runway as basically spot landings.

All went off ok (I suppose), but for the two times I landed slightly short and parked the plane in the river and the other time that I ballooned rather badly. Because we touched down without any brakes and I forgot to pull full brakes before pulling back on the stick. A bit of a stupid mistake, but all is good. Lots learnt at a price tag off 202.40ZAR.