My Flying

Left home at 8:30 and arrived back at 20:00, so that was a full 11½ away from home. The wife was not impressed. I feel guilty, but what can you do.

I tried to reassure her by saying that once I had my license I would be less at the airfield, but while I am a student I need to grab every flying opportunity that comes along as well as flying as frequently as possible so as to flatten my learning curve.

The ridge was working well enough to keep the glider up and between 700 and 1000 feet AGL. My turn arrived with instructor F(2) and after a nice challenging take off from 16L we headed straight for the ridge. On takeoff the plane weather cocked rather seriously into the wind, even though I launched with the left wing a little low, full right rudder seemed to take forever to straighten the plane and deviate it from its chosen course towards the long grass and bushes.

On the way up while I was pulling back on the stick the speed started to bleed off to about 100km/h, so I levelled off a little and rocked the wings to signal for more power, which arrived nicely. The instructor was a little curious regards my decision to do this, but seemed to agree after I explained it too him.

On arriving at the ridge I was promptly reprimand for a bad decision to join, which under review was wrong, but made sense to me at the time. We arrived in the middle at 850ft (150 ft clear of the top) and I had to decide whether to go left or right. To my right was a glider following the ridge and heading away, so I decided to turn right to follow it, this resulted in us flying over the ridge. My reason being that it was better to follow the glider, less traffic congestion, and that we were high enough above the ridge for the manoeuvre. He however said that as we did not know the prevailing conditions at the ridge, it was unwise to fly over it and I should have rather stayed clear of the top and thus should have turned left. If we had encountered severe sink it might have pulled us into the mountain.

I soared the ridge for an hour, finding a few very nice strong bubbles and managed to keep the plane at 1000 feet for a good long while. Later an ASW17 joined us and the Single Astir and this made for lots of interesting neck craning. I was rather impressed with myself as I a managed to stay above both planes for most our time there.

I planned the whole circuit and executed the landing with zero verbal or other input from the instructor. The landing went off well, except that the cross wind pushed us way to the right. I noticed the drift too late to do much about it and had no option but to land well off centre. Not serious as there was nothing for the right wing to hit.

So it was a very nice and hot (30º C) day in the sun = ZAR155,50.