My Flying

Well, what can I say about today? Mmmmhhh, it was definitely interesting to say the least, but where to start?

Ok, for starters the day started off with me feeling a little lethargic and not really lus to do much, the weather forecast did not look great with lots of wind predicted and WeatherSA’s soaring website predicted very little thermal activity for the day.

Never-the-less, I headed out and was pleasantly surprised by the good turn out of members and the wind that was blowing nicely on to our ridge.

Then things started to get really interesting!

I took the third winch launch of the day from 16L in the club’s Astir CS, my normal plane and which has also nicely been fixed up. I must admit that I was slightly nervous after my previous two winch launch from previous weeks that were either fucking fast or kak slow, and I was not to be disappointed.

The launch started off balls to the wall and I’m signalling like mad to the winch driver to slow me down, which he does, but so dramatically that the cable goes limp and I hear a soft click from under the belly of the plane, “shit” I think to myself, “it’s back released!” I tug on the yellow knob just to make sure; “now what?”

Initially I didn’t even look at the altimeter as it felt as if I way high enough to do a circuit and I banked the glider to the left to have a look at the airfield, “yip, plenty of height”. I then glanced down at the altimeter which was reading a little over 300 ft. The downwind and base turns were LOTS of fun as the fresh wind, that was about 30° cross, made the turns very wide and long on the ground. Anyways, I was aiming for the right runway and landed perfectly after keeping my circuit tight and making my base turn very short so as not to get too far way from the airfield and needing to turn steeply close to the ground.

“Well that was fun”, I thought after opening the canopy, “NOT!”.

One lesson learnt here is that when the wind is strong and cross, to always turn so that your final turn is into wind. This I did not do. I do however know about it, but when the cable released I instinctively turned for a left circuit as this is how we fly a standard circuit for 16L.

So a little later I decide that I need some aerotow practice. The wind was still blowing about 25kph and about 30° cross from the left and I got CLEAR instructions from the tug pilot to keep left of him in the ground run so that he does not run out of rudder authority.

Hooked up, take up slack, all out…. And what happens? The darn plane, once again, has a mind of it’s own and starts veering right (anti-weather cocking). I’m moving so slowly that no amount of rudder helps and once I cross the centre line and I’m still heading for the side, I pull that yellow knob and watch as the tug leaves me behind. Sigh!

I don’t know what it is? Perhaps the tailskid, but sometimes the Single chooses a direction and it takes a loooong time to straighten her out. This time I didn’t want to get too far on the wrong side of the tug so I released.

Second attempt. The plane runs perfectly straight and I’m concentrating hard to stay left of the centreline, but while still travelling slowly I some how managed to drop the upwind wing quite a bit. I had it up again quickly enough and as I was not yet going that fast all went well; it was just hard work trying to force the glider down while the tug was still running on the ground.

The tug pilot took me to the ridge where I started to play. I was quickly up to about 2000 ft after making use of two thermals that I found on windward side of the ridge. I played around for just over an hour climbing to cloud base which was a very low 2800 feet AGL. It was interesting as the wind was really blowing up there and the ground drift was quite severe. Once I was under the clouds there was lift everywhere, it was pretty amazing and the first time that I have experience general lift everywhere.

My motion sickness then again unfortunately began to raise its ugly head. I don’t know why it comes and goes like this, sometimes I’m fine and other time a feely really crappy, like today.

Anyways I was feeling pretty crappy and I decided to land, problem was that I just couldn’t get down. At one point I was charging randomly around the sky at 160 kph and I still was not going down. Several stalls, steep turns and a few downward spiral turns with a few side-slips for practice eventually got me down to circuit height for a very good circuit and landing.

A very nice day, but for the two false starts and the darn motion sickness, made extra enjoyable as my folks came to watch the activities for the first time. The cost was 159.10ZAR for the glider and probably about 100.00ZAR for the short tug tow.

After last week's self imposed flying embargo I was very eager to get into the air again. The weather forecast for today didn't look good as very strong winds were predicted from the afternoon onwards.

I arrived early at the airfield and the winch driver was already there, so things were looking good. However, it didn't last that way. The rest of the crew had very little interest in getting things moving and as there were no students for the Twin they "made" the decision not to organise things and to get the winch going. After a little grumbling and getting things organised, I eventually managed to persuade the crew "help me out", but by then it was already late and the wind was beginning to pick up.

My first launch was at 12:00pm and I managed to stay aloft for about 7 minutes in some weak lift after a really cr@ppy winch launch where I only managed 800 ft into a moderate head wind. The launch was way to fast in the beginning and only after lots and lots of signalling did it slow down, this of course wasted valuable climbing time.

By then a student has arrived and the Twin was taken to the launch point for a few short flights. The wind was starting to pick up and was blowing at 25 kph and gusting 50 kph and it was decided to abandon flying. I elected to take a final winch launch for Single's hangar flight.

Unfortunately the launch was even worse than before in that this time it was too slow and after not gaining much height and an airspeed of about 75kph I decided rather to pull the plug and to land ahead. Later, I was queried on my decision and told that I should have stuck it out and pulled. I still however feel that my call was good, though marginal. Why stick it out in a cr@p launch that MAY get better? Why not land ahead and start again? Besides the safety aspect of pulling the ply early and giving yourself more time to land ahead, I am also paying for the launch and I want a decent one.

Later I did realise that the launch would probably have got better and that due to the strong wind it would have improved significantly once I was out of ground effect; but I will leave that experiment for another day.

So all in all a disappointing day. The weather and lift (reported back by the motor-gliders) was rather good in the morning, but the crew resulted in things starting off too late. My first flight was good and the landing a beaut, but the second never really got off the ground, literally. Cost = 52.95ZAR.

Today was an interesting day, and even though I never flew (don't ask why, as I can't explain) I had a good time. I was on winch duty and helped train a new guy for this exciting, and often yawned upon and forgotten, duty.

We had plenty of winch launches and a few aerotows and most the guys managed to hang around for a while using the weak lift on the ridge.

There was even a flight in a rare BS1 that was recently acquired by one of our members.

It was a very hard day's work, what with launching gliders, repairing cables, towing the cable back to the launch point and even retrieving the odd glider or so.

No fly day do work commitments.