My Flying

The weather did not look promising for the day with a light wind and a very blue sky.
I took a winch launch from 08 into the South Easterly after having observed some of the other planes successfully staying aloft for more than a circuit.

About 3/4 the way through the launch I felt and heard the thermal I flew through and it felt good. After the launch I made a u-turn and quickly found some lift. I spent the next hour and a half playing in the thermals and picking up lots of experience.

I think I pretty much have my thermalling speed control under (well) control and I can keep the needle around the 80 mark without really concentrating. That with the working audio for the vario means that I can spend much more time outside the cockpit.

I was also playing with my new PDA and SoarPilot gliding software. Works very nicely thank-you. The only problem is that pressing buttons and flying don't work so well together. I however need to get used to the software and PDA as I will be using it for some cross country flying in the future.

The circuit went off well enough and so was the landing onto 16R.

Unfortunately for me the ground crew were either fast asleep or didn't give a crap, as I had to man handle the aircraft off the runway solo. I then sat patiently waiting while the Twin landed, was retrieved, was launched, landed again and was retrieved. So after eventually realising that I was not going to get any assistance, I walked back to 08 and fetched my bakkie with the tow-out gear. Drove back to the glider, hooked up everything and put the plane back in the hangar. Fortunately for me, I had long since fixed and made new tow out gear and it all went smoothly for a one man operation. So that's 206.50ZAR for 90 minutes and a launch.

I spent most of yesterday working in the cold wind fixing and modifying the trailer for the Single Astir and today I'm paying the price. - I'm feeling really yechy.

I headed off early to the airfield and things were very quiet and there also wasn't too much interest in flying gliders. I worked a little on the Single testing out the new cabling for my PDA making plans to mount the borrowed oxygen bottle.

Due to my dicey state of health I headed off early for home where, after lunch, I dozed off in front of the TV for a nice relaxing Sunday afternoon snooze. Tomorrow it's back to the rat race.

Talk about weird and interesting weather.
Nobody was quite too sure what was going on Sunday. On Saturday the dry and hot Northerly berg winds pushed the temperatures well into the 30’s. I sweltered in that heat while making further changes to, and fixing, the trailer.

The weather forecast had predicted the same for today, i.e. hot, dry weather with strong winds. The day however started with clear skies and not a breath of wind.

On the way to Uitenhage I soon noticed the thick grey smoky smog like stuff just hanging in the air, almost blanking out the sun a reducing visibility to a few kilometres. It did not look very pleasant and I was hoping that the predicted Northerly would blow it away.

The hot Northerly however never really arrived and on the ground it was rather like a cold South-Westerly. Never-the-less I took the second aero tow of the day on our now shortened to 45m tow rope.

For my first tow in a while I was a little rusty and the cross wind caused me to drop a wing which I was a little slow in catching. When I did, it felt like it took forever to get it up again. I was then a little eager with back pressure on the stick and the plane just didn’t yet have enough speed to fly and come back to earth with a good bounce. After that the tow went very well and I actually prefer using the shorter rope over the longer one as the tug more easily pulls the glider into the turns. I however found that keeping vertical position to be little more tricky and it required a fair amount of brain processing power.

I released at about 2500 ft in the thick smoggy stuff a proceeded to glider back to earth. On the way down I found some weak broken bubbles and used then as best as I could. It worked out well enough and I landed after 25 minutes. The circuit and landing went down well, though I landed a little deeper than I would normally have liked.

About a ½ hour later I took a second flight. The launch went much better than the first and I was towed for 9 minutes to 4000 ft (ouch $$$$$). On the way down I found next to no lift and landed pretty much the same as the previous flight after a 29 minute flight.

So it was pretty interesting day. I got in some more aerotow practice, on a short rope, as well as some cross wind landings and takeoffs, at 99.90ZAR for flying and 375.00ZAR for tows.

I spent the entire Saturday working on the Single’s trailer and come Saturday evening I was exhausted with lots of aching muscles.

Today at the airfield we had a very good turnout of members, plus some paxes and the weather was good (but not gliding good). Unfortunately not much happened though, as it seemed that nobody was very lus to get things going.

So we all went Falking. I took a short 34 minute spin in the Falke in bumpy cross wind conditions. Three landings and some “lift” in the bowl of the gliding ridge all at 153,60 ZAR.