My Flying

A very decent winter's day, with some interesting weather resulting in some excellent lift around the airfield. One glider was up for 110 minutes and only returned because it was getting late. This is very impressive considering that the ridge wasn't used and this is the middle of winter.

I had four flights, just to practice circuits and landings. I was a little rusty during the first take off (34R) and flight and my approach was a little off. The next take-off went very well and we found some excellent lift that kept us up for about 25 minutes before I decided to return.

I practiced thermaling with tightish turns, it was very bumpy in places and I found it hard to keep the plane level in a turn. Sometimes it would reach the end of the lift and just fall out resulting in a type of a spiral dive. Going to need more practice here, but I don't think I did too bad, considering this was my first real soaring without too much backseat assistance.

For the third and fourth flights we moved to 26L and the launches went very well with minimal input from the instructor F(5). Climbed out to 1200 feet, did some nice straight and level and efficient flying then landed. Both landings had a crosswind component of about 75° blowing at about 15 km/h. I found it made the landing a lot more tricky as the approach was not in line with the runway and I needed to kick the glider straight before holding off and the touching down.

All four of my approaches were very high and full airbrakes and half way down the runway later we were down. But as they say, rather too deep than too short and into the fence. The last landing was a bit of a muck up, found myself going too slow twice and the instructor needed to seriously help out on the hold off by closing the brakes. The ground handling was also a bit of a disaster and almost resulted in an off road excursion. Things can go wrong very quickly.

A very pleasant day with much learned. Four flights, 37 minutes and 206,60ZAR.

For those of you interested in some stats. So far I have had 27 flights equalling 6.9 hours. The total cost (only flying and launches) has been 1548ZAR. The average flight length was 15 minutes and included four flights in the Motor Falke, two in a Dimona and the balance (21) in the Twin Astir.

I have progressed from that horrible feeling during banking that one would fall out the sky to being able to flight straight & level, perform steep and being 90% involved in the takeoffs and landings.

An interesting, but also a very frustrating day. Due to various issues (that I'd rather not discuss here) gliding only started at 1:00 pm. The day started off cloudy with a light drizzle in the early hours of the morning. I walked the wing of the Twin to 26L then had to do a u-turn and walk it to 16L, a distance of about 2,2 km (more issues), for the south-easterly.

After two pax flights, I flew twice with instructor F(4) and both takeoffs and landings went well, though unfortunately I could not determine exactly how much he was involved in the proceedings. The first flight was a good 22 minutes long and we transversed the ridge several times climbing slowly to about 900 feet AGL. We could have stayed up longer but I was more interested in practicing landings. The second flight was an intentionally short 6 minutes. What I did practice during the first flight was nice smooth slow flying with good co-ordinated turns and good speed control.

During the day there was also a very nice formation fly over by five planes from a local air school then later that afternoon an amazing low level pass over 26L, heading west, of a privately owned L29 jet. And again, just as low, doing about 600 km/h (or so he radioed to the traffic in the area - show off!)

A long day made even longer by the fact that this is the middle of winter and the sun sets at about 5:30 pm. Total for both flight was 102,40ZAR.

At last, a day for us men!

For once I found out that there would be no instructor on duty before actually arriving at the airfield. So I decided not to go. It is after all Father's Day and a long weekend so I doubt there will be much happening anyways - and it's a great opportunity to spend some family time at home. The weather does look great for circuits though.