My Flying

Another day in the sun, but with a difference.

The holding point of runway 08 had lots of shiny white gliders. Looked very nice. Looked very glider like and professional. Only two problems though: The soaring weather was sheeeet (again) and there were almost more planes than crew to get them airborne. If the soaring weather had been good there would have been a problem as half the planes would have needed to stay on the ground.

We also had another new ASW20 take to the skies. Not the first time at Uitenhage, but the first time for it's owner!

I took a winch launch in my 20. It was up, then down. A whole 5 minutes. I still need to get used to this retractable wheel thing as on downwind I realised that I had never raised the main wheel after the launch and while doing a few turns to find lift I must have lost a bit of performance.

Later that day the easterly picked up and the windsock blew rather limpy in the direct of the ridge. The previous two flights reported that the ridge was not working, but as the rest of the sky looked sad, I thought that I would give it a go. A bit of a crappy winch launch (I'm starting to develop a phobia here as the last launch of the day always seems to be a stuff up). At about 250 feet the power slowly started to disapear, but I kept on pulling lightly just to give me enough for a circuit (if needed). At 500 feet I waggled the wings to signal to the winch driver for more power and it almost instantaneously arrived. I climbed nicely to about 900 feet until things started getting very fast and at 150kph there is really no point in even trying to signal to slow down so I just pushed the nose down to keep the wings on and the speed climbed to about 160kph when I pushed down the nose even more and released followed by a serious pull up to convert all that speed into height. In the end I managed 1100 feet off the launch.

Next followed a very interesting and challenging 20 minutes on the ridge. In flap 4 (thermal setting), with the gear up (this time) and doing about 85kph I worked very hard at maximing the very weak lift available on the ridge. At one point I was down to 650ft and just as I was about to head for home I found a nice bubble and worked my way up to 1050 ft. It was hard work, but fun and I learnt quite a bit about the 20. The controls are super light and she's very responsive, even on the aerolons at flaps 4. Still hate the trim though. I love to trim a plane out when thermalling, but with this trim I'm either giving forward or back pressure on the stick to keep the attitude right. I prefer back pressure as it's safer. If you require forward pressure and you aren't concentrating or may relax the pressure and the nose will slowly come up and you could end of stalling or spinning. Not a good idea when flying only metres from rock. Cost = two winch launches : 80.00ZAR.