Archive for 27th December 2007

More circuits

My weather karma seems to have gone the wrong way. During the summer, when it was pouring with rain and nobody was flying due to the weather, I didn’t have a single cancellation. Now the winter’s arrived, which I was told often produces some wonderfully clear (albeit cold) days, I’ve had such a long string of cancellations that it’s now been six weeks since I last went flying!

That means that in twelve weeks I had just one booking that went ahead for a double lesson when I started in the circuit. It was inevitable that I was going to be somewhat rusty this time out in the air, and somewhat “behind the aircraft”.

Had another curve-ball as well, there was a pretty strong wind today blowing across the main runway so we’d be using the much shorter cross-wind Runway 23. So today I would be flying a different circuit than last time, in a different direction onto a shorter runway.

I think it’s fair to say that almost all of my landings weren’t exactly greasers, except for the one that for some reason I got almost exactly right. A couple of silly mistakes along the way didn’t help either, but in general I got most things right and just had some issues with the approach — difficult on this runway anyway, and the flare. Practice will sort both of those out.

In the time since the last flight, I’d bought a simple GPS unit (Locosys GT-11) so I could record the track of where I’ve flown. Here’s the track of today’s flying:

20071227-circuit.png

P/UT Hours Today 0:45, Total 11:35