My Flying

Each Sunday at 9 am the duty crew arrives timeously at our small gliding club; their mission: to get the gliders out of the hangar, prepare the winch and to get things ready for the day. The photo to the right is of them working their little hearts out, the time is 10 am. By 11 am little had changed.

Fortunately for my blood pressure I wasn’t too hassled, an instructor had arrived and I needed to complete a few exercises in the Falke as my MGPL is only a flight test away.

We took off and flew for 50 minutes. In that time we practiced incipient spins, steep turns, in flight emergencies and forced landings. The forced landings were very interesting as it involved us flying around the airfield and discussing various options if we had needed to put the plane down. We then returned to the airfield where we again practiced forced landings, but on the runway as basically spot landings.

All went off ok (I suppose), but for the two times I landed slightly short and parked the plane in the river and the other time that I ballooned rather badly. Because we touched down without any brakes and I forgot to pull full brakes before pulling back on the stick. A bit of a stupid mistake, but all is good. Lots learnt at a price tag off 202.40ZAR.

As it turned out, a damn good day at the airfield.

There was more than the usual turn out of members, everyone helped out and the flying was good. I spent half the day launching gliders with the winch and also managed to get my turn to fly.

I had two check rides in the Twin landing into a light wind on 26L. Shortly thereafter I took off in the Single and other than my nasty balloon on landing, it went off very well. I ballooned because I came in too fast and pulled back too sharply on controls. Some de je view as this is almost the same thing that happened with my first ever landing in the Single. The good news is that I handled the balloon fine and managed a nice landing after that.

Right at the end of the day I brought the Single in for a nice hangar flight. This was also another first for me as the flight was just before sunset. In the photo’s it actually looks much darker than what it was and you can see the sun peeking out from behind a rather dark looking cloud. Four flights, 31 minutes and including launches 196.05ZAR.

I have put some serious flying hours this week, but when is enough ever enough. Well the answer is quite simply, enough us never enough. The weather this Saturday did not look very promising and the clouds were more stratus than cumulus.

Never-the-less I decided to take the Falke for a spin. Needless to say I found only very weak and broken lift and the engine was on the whole time. During my 53 minutes aloft a practiced four circuits as well as sideslips.

Rather a productive day, but at a price (209.00ZAR).

Another weekday, another public holiday, another trip to the airfield.

The weather was not looking to be the greatest and the cu’s were low and looked rather lifeless. As usual the chaps from the training schools were keeping the circuit busy and I decided rather to head off in seek of lift than to compete with two helicopters for airspace.

I chugged around the skies for over an hour finding bits of lift here and there. The lift I did find was good, but either it was very broken or my thermalling sucked big time. At best I would get one or two turns in lift and then loose it. I had the motor going the whole time on idle as the wind was pushing me well north east of the airfield. The air was also cold and I made sure to give regular carb-heat.

During this time I decided to discover what was happening underneath the clouds so I chugged up to cloud base, like 2500 feet, and was pleased to find some nice lift. With the motor on idle I managed to get all the way back to the airfield using the lift right under the clouds and only lost like 500 ft from a distance of about 1.5km out.

I then practiced some landings and they went off very well. What was weird is that the wind on the ground was light but there was major turbulence into the ground effect. On one landing about 3 seconds from the flare, the bottom suddenly dropped and I needed to close the brakes to settle the plane and land. And yes, my airspeed was good!

My longest solo flight yet at 85 minutes = 310.20ZAR = ouch.