My Flying

I was the first to arrive at the airfield and over the course of the next hour the members arrived in dribs and drabs. No one, including myself, looked particularly in the mood for flying and this was compounded by a dead looking sky and a warm northerly wind.

Northerly (berg) winds usually signify strong winds higher up and also lots of turbulence created by the various mountains that the wind blows over on its journey inland towards the ocean.

It was decided that we would do training in the Motor Falke and about halfway through the proceedings I opted for a short solo flight to test out the conditions. I used runway 34L and the wind was relatively calm on the ground, but from about 500 feet up it was a very light northerly, but quite turbulent.

I made my way to the northern side of the gliding ridge (a side seldom used) to try out for some lift and found quite a few nice strong bumps. There was however sink between the bumps and the lower I slowly drifted on the ridge the worse the lift got. After about 30 minutes of this (with the engine on idle) I decided to fly around the back of the ridge and back to airfield.

I made a wide berth around the leeward side of the ridge so as to avoid the worst of the sink and turbulence but still found myself being tossed around quite a bit. I experience two particularly strong bursts of turbulence that really unsettled the plane and gave me a bit of a fright. Never-the-less, I headed back for a nice short landing onto 34L. Cost = 112.80ZAR.