My Flying

A light blowing South-Easter meant that we could soar our ridge for the middle part of the day. My half an hour flight soaring to a maximum of 800 feet (above runway elevation) over the ridge made up for the frustration of arriving first at the field at 9am and only getting my turn to fly at about 3pm later that afternoon.

Google Earth

The winch launches were not good from the shorter 16L with the light wind blowing and my best launch was 800 feet. The instructor F(1) was a little conservative on the launches and didn't enjoy any climbing angles of more than about 35° to 40°.

I also enjoyed three short flights of about 4 minutes each in which I practiced my circuits and landing. I still find flaring a little tricky and the unusually high flare with the resulting high pitch of the nose during the final touch down, used by this instructor, was a little unusual for me as it resulted in the tail wheel touch down well early of the main wheel.

Back to the ridge soaring! It was amazing and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The two aspects I enjoyed the most were (a) the low altitude, a few times we dropped below the top of the ridge and (b) the soaring with two other gliders which made for lots of looking out and keeping an eye on the other planes. As the ridge is rather short, about 2km long, it resulted in some nice close flying. Sorry no pictures, but next time!!!

So I got a little closer to handling the landings and learnt some ridge soaring techniques, some rules of the air and a bit more about neat turns. All in all a well 212,00ZAR spent.

After last week’s great flying today was always going to be a bit of a let down. Weather forecast as been predicting rain for today since about Thursday. And sure enough, the light morning showers have arrived.

Phoned some people at the airfield and they confirm that there will be no flying this morning, and probably none this afternoon as the instructor is heading home.

Happy factor = 9/10. As there was a fresh westerly wind blowing we winch launched from runway 26L with instructor F(2).

The first launch was a little rusty, but other than that all the flights went very well. During the day I practiced shallow and medium stalls, adverse effects of controls (i.e. full rudder without aerlons and full aerlons without rudder) and two steep turns.

The landings progressively got better and I completed two circuits and landings with almost no control or verbal inputs from the instructor. I still need work on my flaring and judging the rate of decent for finals, but other than that all went very well. So that was six flights totalling 38 minutes for a well spent 278,40ZAR.

A Salto on a high speed down wind flyby after an aerobatics display.

Never thought I would ever say this, but flip, I've had enough of wet.

Light drizzle with overcast conditions = earth bound. Week number three without any real flying.