My Flying

Today was a good day for my solo cross country in the motor glider, and after some planning I set off on a short trip to a nearby airfield on the coast.

The weather report was good, but the wind at about 6000 ft was predicted to be 30 to 40 knots. No problem, as I wasn't planning on going that high.

I was going to learn a lot today, mostly about crabbing. Once I had reached the coast and had passed through the extremely bumpy and rough turbulence of the last set of mountains the wind quickly started pushing me towards the sea. In fact, the ocean arrived a lot quick than I expected, I think perhaps because I was spending a lot of time concentring on just flying the plane through the bumps. By the way, this was all happening at 2000 ft.

Once on the coast I needed almost full power at one stage to keep away from the ocean. My airspeed was 117 kph and the ground speed on the GPS read 20.9 kph, that's a 96 kph headwind and according to the Beaufort Scale, storm strength. Weird, all this with only very high level clouds and a light breeze on the ground.

I descended as low as I dared, to about 1300 ft, and crabbed at 80° to my course the whole way there. At that altitude I at least managed a ground speed of about 50 kph, but at that speed it took me a very long time to reach Jeffrey's Bay.

Once there I did the standard left join overhead at 2000 ft and began to plan my circuit, which was a mess. With all that crabbing and being pushed around by the wind I often lost sight of the runway. Never-the-less I got down safely on the numbers after having to execute two orbits on finals to loose some height and zoom past a water tower and over some telephone lines on a interesting approach to 26. Again, on the ground the wind was light.

On the way back the wind was more in my favour and the crabbing worked well as I could aim for a nice mountain peak. The fun on the return trip was however with ATC, but that's a story for another day.

I arrived safely back at FAUH after performing a very nice landing and having a 2.5 hour flight. I could have driven to Paradise Beach and back, TWICE, in my car, but hey, it would not nearly had been as much fun. I'm also now a bit scared to work out the cost of this little trip, but here goes ... ... ... ... 651.60ZAR, mmmmhhhh, not so bad after all.