My Flying

I have often thought that it is a real pity that our club is so small and has such a tiny contingent of members (about 25), not because of the obvious reasons like the economics of scale and so on, but because some of these aviators actually read this blog and, sometimes the situation arises, like today, when I can actually taste the blood in my mouth from having to bite so hard on my tongue so as to shut the fuck up and not to say anything. Today there were one or two (or perhaps even three) members that seriously pissed me off. Call me a control freak, an arsehole or what ever the fuck you want, but the bottom line is that the planes are not going to get into the sky without every single member doing his bit and I am at a failure to understand why constant arse licking, prodding and explanation are required. I'm sorry, I just don't get it! Really I don't. I understand that we are currently living in a me-me-me-me-me-me-me world, but come on people, this is gliding and that attitude just ain't going to work here, so please - leave it at home!

So after my rant and some venting, this is what actually happened, and didn't happen, at the airfield today:

The Twin is still unfortunately out of action so I expected that we would do no actual proper gliding today, which is sad as the weather looked very promising. It was hot, nice and hot and it looked like the inversion that often plagued our valley would not be an issue today.

Unfortunately, as it turned out the winch was out of action due to it have a very flat battery due to "circumstances". We used this time to add the last stock of wire to the winch's drum (which should have been done months ago) but has now fortunately been sorted. We also used the time to fill two of our 200 litres drums with petrol and this was successfully completed after quite a bit of {deleted - mmmhh, tasty blood}.

The report back from the first Falke flight of the day was good so I decide to go for a short spin and took off from 26 into the very light wind. This was the best fun I have had in the Falke for a long time and after really fighting to get to 2000 ft (with the engine on idle) I found some really good lift and hang around at 3000 to 3500 for a while. Sadly I needed to return as there were others that also wanted to fly. From about 3000 feet and at the very western tip of the sandy flats I judged that I would be able to glide back (engine on idle - yeah yeah, call me a sissy).

My visual final glide worked out very well and about half way back I had the stick forward and kept the plane at about 150 kph. I got back a little low, perhaps 800 feet AGL, but very safely execute a tight "circuit" for 26R and a T&G.

As the wind was light and blowing cross between 16 and 26 I decided to give a cross wind landing on 16 a bash. I set up a shortish final and crabbed nicely in to float and touch down. Definitely not one of my better landings, but this was not due to the cross wind which turned out to be not much of an event.

So after the morning's issues the day ended with a good 48 flight (at 226.80ZAR) and two nice landings.