My Flying

I spent most of today, Saturday, working in the hangar at the airfield busy fixing and modifying the tail-dolly for the Single Astir. This is the fourth Saturday I have spent on this job and I'm almost done now.

Firstly, I stripped down the old and broken glass from the dolly, removed the hinges and latches and sanded it down to remove the old paint. Then I layered several new pieces of glass to repair the damaged areas and plugged the old bolt holes. The wheel assembly was also removed and a complete new bracket was made up (thanks to my father) that now has a much greater trailing angle than the old one.

Today I removed the old foam and glued in new foam. Then we replaced the hinges and latches so that everything fitted nice and snug and ensured that the wheel assembly sat nice and square relative to the ground. This may sound like a quick job, but it's not! The dolly was put in place and strapped up so many times that I can now do it blind folded and in my sleep.

What now remains is to paint everything and get it looking nice and lekker. This is planned for this coming Saturday.

After all this labour I took the Falke (for which I now have a license!!!! have I mentioned this) for a quick spin (a few circuits) at about 4:30pm. I was using 16 and the sun was low and almost directly behind me which made for some amazingly pretty approaches as I could watch as my shadow converged with me during the final few metres of the approach and flare. 92.20ZAR