My Flying

The soaring weather started off looking awesome and by the time I arrived (9 am) the duty crew (of which I was one) had already extracted the aircraft from the hangar and the winch was ready to go.

So things looked promising. We started flying early and at about 10:30 the Twin managed to stay airborne for a good 45 minutes. We were all thus getting excited and awaited our turn. I was just ready to fetch the Single from the hangar, but decided to wait and watch one more flight in the Twin. By then the sky was getting too blue and the cu's were disappearing and he was coming down too quickly. The report back was - no lift. And so the trend continued and I decided to rather fly the Twin than to go and fetch the Single from the hangar.

During my two flights with an assistant instructor in the back as a pax I was pushing to find lift and ended up pushing too hard. I returned a little low after the first exploration for lift (where I actually managed to find lots of sink) and needed to execute a very short and tight circuit. But all was cool and went off well.

For the second flight I headed off to the same spot as before as before take off I saw some very nice cloud activity in that direction over the ridge. Again, on the way the vario occasionally hit the -5.0m/s stops and it was not looking good. Never before have I experience so much sink around the airfield as today, it was like the vario was stuck between -2.0 and -5.0.

I turned back for 26L and the runway looked a little far away. On the way there I felt a bump and decided to try my luck and succeeded in perform a circle, finding bugger all lift and loosing precious height. By now the runway was too far and I went for my backup plan which was a cross wind landing on the closer, 16L, runway.

I was a little nervous about the cross wind as the wind today had been very unusual in that is blew constantly from the south-west but the speed kept fluctuating between like 5kph and 20kph, but not in gusts, more like wide swells in the ocean. Never-the-less the cross wind landing went of great.

A few hours later I took the Twin for its hangar landing - solo. Interestingly enough this was my first ever solo flight in the Twin. I went solo in the Blanik and from there straight to the Single. It actually flies very nicely solo. I noticed that the controls and most noticeably the elevator was lighter and more responsive, however I also clearly felt that penetration into wind was less (due to the reduced mass from not having a person in the backseat).

So an interesting a nogal very nice day at a rather expensive 149.25ZAR for three winch launches and a whole 13 minutes of flying.