Tinworm-wings

Monday, 11 April 2011

Really must get a good camera which I can use in flight. Flew to Ipswich this morning, via Mistley, and hovered over the Orwell Bridge, ticking another box...but wish I could have photographed it.

Next time I want to carry on round the town and find my house....and snap that too.

1hr ten mins, bringing my total since I moved to Great Oakley, three weeks ago, to 5hrs 15mins! ......making this the best month of flying since I got my licence.

twilight flight

Just before sunset this evening, I went up for a half hour bimble. I had watched the weather numbers all day and was surprised when I turned off my car engine and got out, to discover that far from there being the 7mph of wind forecast, the air was perfectly still.

My engine idle is very much improved, though I am still rather tentative about backing off the revs that far in flight; fearful that it will die and not re-start. That is another area for confidence-building. When I switched off it was idling at about 3,200.....a little high, but better that that considerably lower and more vibey at 2,500.

Got home tonight to find that tomorrow's horror story of high winds has been rewritten with a pre-mid day calm, so I am going up again in the morning, though this time I will not be airborn before 0830!

That means a lie-in until about 7a.m.

I am on a roll!

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Saturday, 9 April 2011

Pitsford (FAO Sam)

Sam, this is the Pitsford film I meant. Mine is the red one, but the pilot is Ben Ashman, its designer. Follow this link for the time I flew in there.

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Manoeuvrable trolley and kit cabinet

A truly terrible quality film, granted, but it shows how easily I can move my trike between other aircraft...to fit it in a tight space...without having to do a twenty-point turn!

The weekend I moved-in, I brought over this filing cabinet and all my other gear. It means that I can turn up without too much hassle, pull my pre-rigged, readily fuelled aircraft out . . .

and go flying!

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Dawn Patrol bollocking

Heavy winds for the foreseeable future (or so it appeared last night)....except for a window of opportunity this morning between 4 and 10 a.m., so I grabbed the time, taking off at 07:20, only to get a very tactful bollocking when I came down an hour later, as I had broken the out-of-hours restrictions, which limit take-offs to between 08:30 and 21:00. If I'd known about that I'd have thought twice about Great Oakley, as I love dawn and dusk flying, but I mustn't complain as I am flying far more frequently now.

I climbed to 1,000 much more quickly than in recent flights, then turned and headed downwind to Mistley, then back up the river again. I climbed to 3,000, where the wind was stronger and had backed, so that I barely felt I was moving, but tentatively tested the down-wind scuttle (occasionally turning back), selected an emergency field on the bank of the Stour, then made my crossing ...but there was no way I was going to make sufficient progress to get to the Orwell Bridge, so flew south, a bit, along the coast and back home.....to change my radio battery. (Must charge both of them).

I went up again at about 09:00 for 35mins, then landed to do some maintenance. With Doug there to lend an expert hand, I adjusted some wires which were twisting and adjusted my tick-over so that the plane now idles at 3,000 revs. It sounds sweet.

Looks like I might get an hour or two in tomorrow, mid to late afternoon.This is already looking like a great school holiday :)

Sunday, 3 April 2011

Today I more than doubled my hours in the air this year!

"My god, she is beautiful!"
....she burst into life in a split second when I pressed the starter.
I flew for over an hour this morning...out to Ardleigh (on the edge of Colchester), down the River Stour to Harwich, then back to Great Oakley.
The engine sounded great.

I found this old trolley in the hangar and nobody knows who it must belong to, so I have borrowed it. It enables me to push the trike in any direction, so that I can tuck it away without having to do a hairy 27 point turn! The front trolley has been lent to me by John who bought it for his Rans Coyote, but finds that it doesn't work well enough for him on his much heavier aircraft on the uneven floor.

After flying I did some maintenance...checking the valve clearances. The inlet valve needed to be closed by 0.05mm. I have never done this before. As the Dragonfly was by then tucked away, it will be Friday at the earliest before I will know whether the adjustment has affected my engine idle.

Then, Craig and Sam suggested we go to the clubhouse for a coffee, and on the way Sam suggested that if I wasn't in a hurry to go home, I go with them on a jaunt to Damyn's Hall, an offer I leapt at. Unfortunately, Craig had problems with his engine and turned back. Sam and I flew on in his Quik....which really IS bloody quick indeed. Great flying.

A really terrific start to the week!

Saturday, 2 April 2011

Home from Home

I have been studying the charts and enjoying Great Oakley's proximity to home. Will have to get a photo of my house from the air!

Ground handling (how to store an aeroplane at home and get it to the airfield)

A trial flight in a Thruster, when I was 28, c.1991

I have started to learn to fly before...TWICE! First time round I had just graduated and got a job at an aerodrome in Cornwall, where I earned flying hours by fuelling microlights, giving hourly weather reports to the Met office etc. The weather was bad, so there was little flying to be had...and in the end I was paid with broken propellers and bits of crashed fuselage to hang on the wall. The boss was a great bloke called Ian Stokes, who had been a leading light in forming the BMAA and had manufactured Thrusters in the early days . In retirement he moved to The Gambia and became a publican and, shockingly, was murdered this year.

Flying Rogues

ten years on from my first experiences at Moorland Flying School (and now nearly ten years ago) the flying school was under new management and my girlfriend and I booked full courses. We both made good progress initially but never felt we were being moved on and had difficulty pinning the instructor down to signing our logbooks. When another instructor signed himself as P1, we got suspicious, contacted the CAA and were horrified to learn that our instructor did not have a current instructor rating, that we had not been insured and that none of our hours counted towards our licences. We were eventually refunded and the instructors were prosecuted by the CAA.

The very sympathetic CAA investigator spoke to the BMAA on our behalf and my hours have been allowed to count (at the discretion of the school). But in point of fact, I flew way over the minimum number of hours subsequently, so it is really quite academic in the end.

Around 2001 an instructor in Norfolk tried to convince me that if I bought his aeroplane he could teach me at a cut rate, as I'd then be using my own plane. Great idea, I thought, except that it turned out that the aircraft in question had failed a noise test and could not be used from the instructor's field. He later admitted that I would have to learn on his aeroplane at the normal rate. He resisted showing me the paperwork, kept avoiding me and eventually, when it was quite clear I wasn't going to buy without the paperwork, told me to F-off.

So far my experience has been that there are a lot of rogues in flying, which is one reason why I was so very impressed by the professional set-up at Sywell.

by air to Africa

My sister and I were lucky to fly many thousands of miles in the 1960s and '70s in many aircraft types, including BOAC VC-10s, Boeing 707s and even a Nigerian Airways Dakota, as our dad (and later our mum) had teaching posts in Kenya and Nigeria. Those were still the romantic days of flying, when passengers walked across tarmac and up steps, rather than walking down the tubes that have turned passenger flying into a mundane affair. (Mind you, aren't take-offs still incredibly exciting!?)

Back then air hostesses GAVE children the sorts of nick-nacks that their parents have to pay fortunes for from the airline catalogue these days; things like model aeroplanes, keyrings etc. We were also given sweets to help us cope with depressurisation. (And they were hostesses, so nobody give me a hard time)

Mum says that I cracked my first joke when I was small, on a flight out to Kenya, when I said, "Mummy, shouldn't there be a wing on this side of the plane too". Apparently I got her with that one.

At Kano airport I remember standing behind an engine and thinking how hot it still was....and then being told that the engine was cold. The heat was Kano. I got a headache and took several days to aclimatise.

The airport perri-ways at Kano were littered with aircraft that didn't make it, including a burnt-out Mig 15. The Nigerian Airforce flew them and my dad played squash with one of their pilots, Ben, at the Kano Club. I recall a Mig fly-past on my birthday. Was it arranged with Ben over a beer? Was it a pure coincidence?

At Entebbe airport (Uganda) I remember climbing down the steps on to the runway and being encircled by soldiers with machine guns, who then went through all our belongings and confiscated my cherished Swiss Army penknife, purchased on one of numerous European stop-overs. That was in the twitchy time after the Israeli hijacking ...and mum had to stifle my protests.

Before my first flight to Nairobi, as an infant, I was scared stiff. I didn't understand that I wouldn't have to sit astride the fuselage, as I did on my pedalcar! In a funny way, I not only overcame that fear but have come full circle; microlighting is just like sitting on that pedalcar......open to the elements - real flying!