My Flying

Today we put my bullet camera and MP4 recorder (actually Mpeg4, but everyone is calling it MP4 these days) to the test on the Twin Astir. Finding a good mounting point proved tricky and we eventually settled on mounting it on top of the instrument cover facing inwards to the person in the front seat.

The results were pretty decent, even though the resolution that the MP4 recorder records at is lower than what the camera can offer and the image stabiliser did not cope too well with the loose instrument cover that resulted in some bumpy footage. Never-the-less the results were good and those concerned suitability impressed.

I would really like to add such a movie to the air experience flights which we offer so as to give the pax some memorabilia for their flight and also to give the gliding club some exposure, but the problem is that this whole copying the movie, editing and putting onto DVD process is rather tedious and time consuming. There is also the small issue in that the club will benefit from my camera hardware while I carry the risk. So we will need to see what the future will offer.

The wind today was a light (20kph-ish) south westerly and I took an aerotow in the Single. This was my first flight in six weeks since my trip to Bloemfontein and I did feel a little rusty.

What I found a little weird was that during the ground run and the first part of the lift off is that I felt that I could quickly catch a quick nap. It was so SLOW. Not slower than normal, but compared with the really fast and high speed ground runs at New Tempe, this was a doddle.

At about 400 feet up the wind was a fair amount stronger and more south easterly above the ridge and I really had a HARD time staying behind the tug. The bumps were serious and I twice banged my head on the canopy during the negative-G stuff.

I flew around for about 44 minutes finding mostly weak lift and tons and tons of sink. I have never seen so much sink in Uitenhage before. It was everywhere and strong, like -4.0 m/s in places. The thing with sink is that there must be lift somewhere and I did eventually find a nice constant 2.5 m/s thermal and used as much of it as possible until it threatened to push me too close to controlled airspace.

My circuit was also rather interesting. I was having a hard time seeing and reading the windsock and when I flew over the sock at about 800 ft it was exactly cross between 16 and 26. As I watched, it switched more for 16 (26 had been the runway for the day and I was the last flight) so I started a left downwind for 16R. About a ¼ into my downwind someone radioed and asked the wind direction, I checked the windsock again and now it had switched more for 26. I was already getting low, but elected to execute a 270º turn to my right which brought me nicely onto finals for 26R. The flare and hold off went well enough and I stopped just in front of the hangars. The cost was 81.40ZAR for the glider and 125.00ZAR for the 5 minute tow.

Unfortunately the Twin will be out of action for a few weeks as a result of some damage that was incurred to the tail wheel section of the fuselage.