My Flying

The day did not start off too promising. When I arrived at the airfield the winch was out of action (again) and the Twin, although the damaged from the previous week had been fixed, was still in pieces and needed to be inspected for it's airworthiness certificate.

The sky was blue and it was starting to get hot and the cu's were starting to pop and things were looking very good aloft for gliding and the winch wasn't working and here I was sitting on the ground.

Though not ideal, and without any other real option I fired up the Falke and off I went. I found a good thermal just off the end of the runway just after take off and used it. Chop chop I was at 2500 ft with the engine at like 80% and the lift was getting better and better the higher I climbed. I soon dropped the revs to idle and at 3500 ft I switched off the engine and spent the next hour having some of the best gliding fun that I have ever had, and this in a Falke. The thermals were cooking and I was averaging 3.0 m/s at times. A major pain when thermalling with the Falke is that it has no string or audio vario and one needs to spend too much time in the cockpit, something that it not the safest and also tends to make one a little airsick.

After an hour I decided to head back and set up a long final glide from 4500 ft from just over the mountains to the North of the sandy patches. On the way back I found lots of lift and arrived back at the airfield at 2000 ft. And this is when the fun really began, trying to get down, as all around the airfield there was lift everywhere.

My first attempt to land, dead-stick, was a bit of a, well, mess! I kept extending my downwind and base and the falke was just not going down at any serious rate. I then tried for finals and pulled the brakes (which aren't that hot in the Falke anyway) and pretty soon realised that I just was not going to make it, so I made a U (the first time that I have ever needed to do this) and then tried a proven technique of running up and down perpendicular to the runway on finals to loose height.

That didn't work too well either and at one point I was climbing like at 2.0 m/s. Just to be safe I started the motor as it looked like my next attempt at landing might result in me needing to abort on finals again and perhaps even go around. After quite a bit of meandering a good distance behind the threshold I eventually lost some more height and tried again. Cr@p!!! Still too high, but not as high as the first time and I side slipped the Falke down. I hadn't side slipped in a good while and it was not pretty, especially entering and leaving the side slip. But I got down and stopped about halfway down the runway, which was not as deep as I was expecting to land.

So, in the end it was rather an exciting day with again, more lessons learned - I just hope that I can remember them all and all this at the bargain price of just 238.80ZAR, for just under an hour and half of flying.

I have often thought that it is a real pity that our club is so small and has such a tiny contingent of members (about 25), not because of the obvious reasons like the economics of scale and so on, but because some of these aviators actually read this blog and, sometimes the situation arises, like today, when I can actually taste the blood in my mouth from having to bite so hard on my tongue so as to shut the fuck up and not to say anything. Today there were one or two (or perhaps even three) members that seriously pissed me off. Call me a control freak, an arsehole or what ever the fuck you want, but the bottom line is that the planes are not going to get into the sky without every single member doing his bit and I am at a failure to understand why constant arse licking, prodding and explanation are required. I'm sorry, I just don't get it! Really I don't. I understand that we are currently living in a me-me-me-me-me-me-me world, but come on people, this is gliding and that attitude just ain't going to work here, so please - leave it at home!

So after my rant and some venting, this is what actually happened, and didn't happen, at the airfield today:

The Twin is still unfortunately out of action so I expected that we would do no actual proper gliding today, which is sad as the weather looked very promising. It was hot, nice and hot and it looked like the inversion that often plagued our valley would not be an issue today.

Unfortunately, as it turned out the winch was out of action due to it have a very flat battery due to "circumstances". We used this time to add the last stock of wire to the winch's drum (which should have been done months ago) but has now fortunately been sorted. We also used the time to fill two of our 200 litres drums with petrol and this was successfully completed after quite a bit of {deleted - mmmhh, tasty blood}.

The report back from the first Falke flight of the day was good so I decide to go for a short spin and took off from 26 into the very light wind. This was the best fun I have had in the Falke for a long time and after really fighting to get to 2000 ft (with the engine on idle) I found some really good lift and hang around at 3000 to 3500 for a while. Sadly I needed to return as there were others that also wanted to fly. From about 3000 feet and at the very western tip of the sandy flats I judged that I would be able to glide back (engine on idle - yeah yeah, call me a sissy).

My visual final glide worked out very well and about half way back I had the stick forward and kept the plane at about 150 kph. I got back a little low, perhaps 800 feet AGL, but very safely execute a tight "circuit" for 26R and a T&G.

As the wind was light and blowing cross between 16 and 26 I decided to give a cross wind landing on 16 a bash. I set up a shortish final and crabbed nicely in to float and touch down. Definitely not one of my better landings, but this was not due to the cross wind which turned out to be not much of an event.

So after the morning's issues the day ended with a good 48 flight (at 226.80ZAR) and two nice landings.

Today we put my bullet camera and MP4 recorder (actually Mpeg4, but everyone is calling it MP4 these days) to the test on the Twin Astir. Finding a good mounting point proved tricky and we eventually settled on mounting it on top of the instrument cover facing inwards to the person in the front seat.

The results were pretty decent, even though the resolution that the MP4 recorder records at is lower than what the camera can offer and the image stabiliser did not cope too well with the loose instrument cover that resulted in some bumpy footage. Never-the-less the results were good and those concerned suitability impressed.

I would really like to add such a movie to the air experience flights which we offer so as to give the pax some memorabilia for their flight and also to give the gliding club some exposure, but the problem is that this whole copying the movie, editing and putting onto DVD process is rather tedious and time consuming. There is also the small issue in that the club will benefit from my camera hardware while I carry the risk. So we will need to see what the future will offer.

The wind today was a light (20kph-ish) south westerly and I took an aerotow in the Single. This was my first flight in six weeks since my trip to Bloemfontein and I did feel a little rusty.

What I found a little weird was that during the ground run and the first part of the lift off is that I felt that I could quickly catch a quick nap. It was so SLOW. Not slower than normal, but compared with the really fast and high speed ground runs at New Tempe, this was a doddle.

At about 400 feet up the wind was a fair amount stronger and more south easterly above the ridge and I really had a HARD time staying behind the tug. The bumps were serious and I twice banged my head on the canopy during the negative-G stuff.

I flew around for about 44 minutes finding mostly weak lift and tons and tons of sink. I have never seen so much sink in Uitenhage before. It was everywhere and strong, like -4.0 m/s in places. The thing with sink is that there must be lift somewhere and I did eventually find a nice constant 2.5 m/s thermal and used as much of it as possible until it threatened to push me too close to controlled airspace.

My circuit was also rather interesting. I was having a hard time seeing and reading the windsock and when I flew over the sock at about 800 ft it was exactly cross between 16 and 26. As I watched, it switched more for 16 (26 had been the runway for the day and I was the last flight) so I started a left downwind for 16R. About a ¼ into my downwind someone radioed and asked the wind direction, I checked the windsock again and now it had switched more for 26. I was already getting low, but elected to execute a 270º turn to my right which brought me nicely onto finals for 26R. The flare and hold off went well enough and I stopped just in front of the hangars. The cost was 81.40ZAR for the glider and 125.00ZAR for the 5 minute tow.

Unfortunately the Twin will be out of action for a few weeks as a result of some damage that was incurred to the tail wheel section of the fuselage.

More work on the Single's tow out gear and some very nice looking clouds that invited me to take the Falke for a quick spin.

I found a few decent thermals but I really had a hard time thermalling and using the lift. I find the Falke difficult to thermal for a number of reasons: (a) You sit on the left and it feels weird thermalling like this, (b) the Falke thermals with a very nose down attitude which also feels weird and (c) you have very little sounds to help you as even the engine at idle makes a noise and you are wearing headphones.

This resulted in (a) me having a hard time controlling the speed as the nose feels all over the place, (b) not turning as tightly as necessary as I'm was not confident with my speed control and (c) spending way too much time with my head in the cockpit with one eye on the ASI and the other on the vario and ball.

I did manage to gain some height, but lost it pretty quickly and eventually elected to land on 16 for a 29 minute flight. The Falke is most definitely not the Single and is a distant second as a glider. Cost = 138.80ZAR.