Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Milestones

Wx been really bad this summer and I had not yet managed a catch a good and easy soaring day with puffy clouds. All my soaring flights this far were in the muggy blue skies scratching around the club.

Soaring being almost non-existent, my aerobatics flying fared a lot better. I am at the point now where I am trying to fly sequences of figures, which are a lot of fun.

Last weekend, I had two firsts: I flew a perfect tailslide in my glider, which is hard to do as you have to hit a perfect vertical in order to slide backwards. Only a handful of glider models are approved for this and mine happens to be one of them.

My second first was of a funny negative kind - I had a soaring flight that was shorter than most of my acro flights. I did couple of acro flights in the morning and wanted to do some soaring in the afternoon. As I was taking a break to lunch and rest, the stable lake air moved in from the east and I had a sleigh ride down. Some of the other gliders managed to stay up though so I knew there was lift.

I went up again a few mins later and had another flight in the muggy blue scratching around the field. Only a few spots were producing usable lift and it I could not go anywhere far from those. I did it for a while and then decided I had enough and came down.

Later that evening, I put the flights in my logbook, added the times up and realized I had another first - I passed 100 hrs in the gliders!