My Flying

In preparation for my gliding trip to Bloemfontein, at the end of this month, I again spent the whole of Saturday afternoon at the airfield doing some work on the Single.
It's amazing how much time gets consumed just doing small tasks. The oxygen bottle bracket, that we made and modified for the second time, unfortunately still did not fit and required further modification. I fitted a small aluminium box on the shelf behind my head to stow some stuff for during the flight and needed to repair the slip (ball) indicator. I also checked and neatened up the wiring for the radio, along with a few small minor tasks.

Today (Sunday) I was on duty at the airfield and didn't really expect to fly. The weather was good enough before 12 pm for a member to have a two hour engine off flight in the Motor Falke. I was encouraged to get the Single out and had a good winch launch (for a change) from runway 16. Unfortunately, by then the lift was all but gone and I managed to scrape around for 10 minutes. I would like to have struck it out a little longer trying to make use of the little lift that I found, but at 700 ft I decided that it would be safer to join and land.

A while later I took my next winch launch. This was going to be interesting as the wind had switched and was now blowing 90º to the runway. It was light at about 5-10 kph so the instructor said I should have no problems. I kept the into wind wing down nicely and had a great launch. There was bugger all lift so I drifted down for a circuit. The circuit went off ok, but I was surprised just how much the light cross wind pushed me off the centre line. I managed to crab myself back to the centre and kicked her straight for a nice flare and landing. I was glad for the experience as I have very little cross wind practice.

So a fair day with some good launches and new experiences at 90.00ZAR.