My Flying

Another day with the new aerie.

We spent the morning weighing and doing the weight and balance checks followed by a good hour's labour polishing.
Almost all the upper surfaces have nasty swirl marks where at some stage someone obvioulsy washed the plane with a rag containing some grit or fine sand.

The thermal weather looked very poor and there was a light northerly blowing which is seldom good for Uitenhage.
At about 1pm I took a winch launch and flew straight into some weak and broken lift. The launch was terrible and I only managed to get 850ft, due mainly to me pushing the nose down, but more on this later.

I pretty soon got a feeling for the plane and the vario and very slowly tried to make use of the availablelift. It took me for ever to get from 850ft to 1500ft (about 8 minutes) with the averager showing +0.1m/s. Once at 1500ft I decided to push off for the northern face of the ridge where guys had previously reported some weak lift. Unfortunatley for me I found sweet zip and reached the far end of the northern ridge at about 900ft. From there the airfield looked very far away but I made it back comfortably to land on 34.

During this launch and the last two launches the previous weekend I picked up a horrible vibration during the launch which no one could really explain to me. Intially it was said that as I was launching at 100kph and pulling I was most likely riding the edge of the stall so during this launch I pushed the nose a lot flatter but still got the vibration until about halfway up. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the vibration ended up being the main wheel that was still rotating after launch and a quick pull on the wheel brake would sort it out.

Much later in the day it looked like the ridge might start working and I got ready for the final launch of the day.

And this was the beginning of yet another chain of events. A few years back I posted an article on a wheels up that I had while flying with an instructor while I was still under training and idientified several links in the chain of events that lead to the event.

Today another chain was well and trully constructed, but fortunatley the final link was lost.

So are are the pieces:

1. The winch driver needed a break to relieve himself.
2. I was a little frustrated with this (he tends to need a crap at the most inconventent times).
3. Another member offered to drive the winch.
4. Although this member has tons of experience, he last drove the winch at least 2-3 years ago.
5. The ground controller for the day had left.
6. Another very experience member took his place.
7. The replacement ground controller, as with the new winch driver, was not current at that duty.
8. I of course was flying a new plane that I was not fully familiar with.
9. And oh yes, I was taking off with a very light tailwind.

So what happened?

I took the launch and for the first few seconds the speed built up very nicely and I rotated and started to climb. At about 50 feet the power decreased significantly, but not suddenly, which left me wondering for a few split seconds whether to release or not. I did. Next, and not unexpectidily as this has happended to me twice before, I end up flying next to the snaking snake. Not a pleasant position to be in as it can either smack a hole in the canopy or wing or even worse snag itself around the plane or a control surface which could result in me crashing. Due to the presence of the snake I needed to keep flying rather far down the runway until I felt that it was safe to land ahead. The problem was that the light downwind pushed up my ground speed a bit and I started to run out of runway and it's surprisingly difficult to land a plane that is floating a few feet above the runway as your normal approach angle is way out. In the end I banged it down a bit hard.

The the moral of the story. When you see those links in the chain start forming, stop right then and ask yourself are you doing the right thing. The cost for the day was fortunatelty two winch launches at 80.00ZAR and a good lesson learnt.