My Flying

For once the gliding weather today was on the better side of marginal; the sky was blue with a few cu's popping, but also breaking up rather quickly. The wind on the ground was a 10-20kph south-westerly.

My first flight was a backseat launch in the Twin and during the winch launch we flew through some nice lift. After release I did a U-turn and managed to find some broken lift. The wind 600ft up was blowing a good 20 to 30 kph and with the weak broken lift the drift along the ground was quite bad. After about 20 minutes of hard work I lost the battle and headed in to land.

About two hours later, and once the weather looked like it had improved somewhat, I took the 20 up for a flight. By then the lift was good, but very broken with bad turbulence. So bad that I didn't thermal at less than 100kph and once a gust was so strong that the 20 almost dropped a wing, and I got a bit of a fright. I managed to stay aloft for 45 minutes before I needed to come land as I had lost my lift. It was also after about 30 minutes of hard work in the sky that I released that I was very flying un-fit. This was probably my longest thermal flight in 5 months and I actually got tired (mentally) very quickly. I found myself flying in circles without really concentrating.

Anyway, at least I got in some good practice and came it for an absolute beaut of a landing.

Weather report 5 days back predicted a gloomy weekend and for once, sadly, they were correct. Yesterday it was overcast with light rain and today it is even worse. I went along to the airfield anyway to sort out a few things. Place was deserted as can be expected, but I really think that the members should realise, and this is something that has been discussed before, is that day's like this are perfect to do some cleaning up and fixing of stuff. But this happens behinds the scenes and is performed by the magic fairies.

Not much to report today.
Weather was again only good for circuits. Took a short flight in the ASW20 and then later another short backseat flight in the Twin Astir. Cost = 88.35ZAR.

Today our club hosted a very successful glider display at a local shopping mall.

Most of the club's members pitched in very nicely to give a hand and the display went off with a hitch. On display was a Salto aerobatic glider, mainly because it's in a very good condition and it's smaller than most so it fitted nicely into our allocated display area. We also offered a competition with a prize being a flight in the club's Twin Astir.