My Flying

Talk about weird and interesting weather.
Nobody was quite too sure what was going on Sunday. On Saturday the dry and hot Northerly berg winds pushed the temperatures well into the 30’s. I sweltered in that heat while making further changes to, and fixing, the trailer.

The weather forecast had predicted the same for today, i.e. hot, dry weather with strong winds. The day however started with clear skies and not a breath of wind.

On the way to Uitenhage I soon noticed the thick grey smoky smog like stuff just hanging in the air, almost blanking out the sun a reducing visibility to a few kilometres. It did not look very pleasant and I was hoping that the predicted Northerly would blow it away.

The hot Northerly however never really arrived and on the ground it was rather like a cold South-Westerly. Never-the-less I took the second aero tow of the day on our now shortened to 45m tow rope.

For my first tow in a while I was a little rusty and the cross wind caused me to drop a wing which I was a little slow in catching. When I did, it felt like it took forever to get it up again. I was then a little eager with back pressure on the stick and the plane just didn’t yet have enough speed to fly and come back to earth with a good bounce. After that the tow went very well and I actually prefer using the shorter rope over the longer one as the tug more easily pulls the glider into the turns. I however found that keeping vertical position to be little more tricky and it required a fair amount of brain processing power.

I released at about 2500 ft in the thick smoggy stuff a proceeded to glider back to earth. On the way down I found some weak broken bubbles and used then as best as I could. It worked out well enough and I landed after 25 minutes. The circuit and landing went down well, though I landed a little deeper than I would normally have liked.

About a ½ hour later I took a second flight. The launch went much better than the first and I was towed for 9 minutes to 4000 ft (ouch $$$$$). On the way down I found next to no lift and landed pretty much the same as the previous flight after a 29 minute flight.

So it was pretty interesting day. I got in some more aerotow practice, on a short rope, as well as some cross wind landings and takeoffs, at 99.90ZAR for flying and 375.00ZAR for tows.