My Flying

Bit of a quiet day at the airfield today with a low turnout of members. The soaring weather report had predicted some weak thermals for early that afternoon and those there were eager to get flying. The Twin and Single were hauled out to 26L and circuit flying commenced. Unfortunately the predicted lift never really arrived and the best we could manage were 10 or so minutes in some very broken and weak lift. I took a backseat flight in the Twin and two flights in the Single.

My first flight in the Single was a bit hairy with the plane pulling very skew on the winch launch during the ground run. It does that sometimes, especially if the winch cable is laid on the upwind side of the runway and the wind is a little cross. The rudder takes a while to become effective but I managed to get airborne in time. I then went exploring quite far for lift and only made it back to the airfield by the skin of my teeth. All valuable lessons learned at a cost of 165.30ZAR.

Yesterday, Saturday, I come to the airfield to do some work on the winch and also took a short 26 minute spin the in Falke. The wind was blowing SW and strong (60 kph) from about 1500 feet up. I tried to soar the Western side of the ridge but was pretty unsuccessful. There were a few nice bumps, but not much else at 99.84ZAR.