My Flying

Bloemfontein Camp - Day 4

What to say about today? Ponder, ponder, think, think, mmmmhh? Ok, I need to make a small confession: I'm actually writing this blog a few weeks later and I actually can't remember much about what happened on this day. Very weird as day 4 seems to have just merged into the rest of the week and has become, well, slightly forgotten.

To help me to unravel these forgotten events I have needed to rely mainly on my logger's trace as well as the few photos that I took. So, after carefully reconstructing the events of day 4, this is what happened:

The morning started off looking much the same as the previous day being mostly overcast, but with a few blue gaps in the clouds. The weather prediction was also very much the same as the previous day, i.e. not good (remember the moist air from Mozambique?). However, today the grid was full. I think that the success of the three pilots in yesterday's mediocre weather and the fact that most had had a rest day, was encouragement to give today a bash.

We launched from 36 and pretty soon I found some lift, though it did take me a little longer than normal. Today I basically flew to the dam and back as I was not confident with the lift. The high cloud remained there for most of the day (as can be seen in the photo), though it did disappear towards the late afternoon and a few cumulous clouds did develop during the course of day. I managed to get as high as 10300 feet AMSL and spent most my time (2.5 hours) between 8500 and 9500 feet.

When I studied the logger's trace for the flight I can see that either my thermalling technique today was not great or the lift was weak as my average climb was 0.6 m/s and I spent lots of time thermalling and either not getting anywhere or going down. Never-the-less the flight was enjoyable and I uneventfully landed on 36.

Now that I think about it, I also need to mention my take off. On day one I mentioned that I had witnessed some hairy take offs and today, was unfortunately my turn. Though not as hairy as some of those that I witnessed, I was sure kept very busy and was definitely wide awake by the time I reached the end of the runway.

I was caught by complete surprise and did learn a valuable lesson. Today the wind was blowing VERY light from the west, but we still used 36 so in other words the wind was almost 90º cross from the left. The ground run went off fine and I lifted off nicely behind the tug and stayed low. Then something weird happened (a good number of seconds after this photo below was taken), the tug suddenly started to crab seriously to the left and I though to myself, HUH? And then less than I second later my left wing suddenly lifted and pushed me out of position to the right and high. I fought briefly to get the plane back behind the tug and then proceeded crab into the cross wind and followed the tug's example.

So what happened? It's pretty simple really and I figured it out later when back on terra firma. Along the left side of the runway is a tall long row of pine trees. During the ground run and the first bit while getting airborne the trees shielded me from the cross wind. However, the moment we passed the trees the cross wind caught us. The tug driver was prepared and crabbed immediately, I was however a little asleep, but figured things out quick enough. In retrospect it may have been nice for the tug driver to warn me, but hey I should also have been more prepared.

The cost of this whole exercise was 630.10ZAR including 360.00ZAR for the tow.