Day: April 21, 2011

For once it looks as though the weather is going to hold and we can expect three or four days of lovely flying weather. Given last week’s experience, I’m not so sure what the vis is going to turn out like though. In past years, whenever we’ve had a particularly cold, wet Winter, we’ve always suffered with haze whenever the sun has come out when it has begun to turn warmer. Whether it’s due to the water in the ground that has become saturated re-emerging into the atmosphere, or just to the coldness of the ground causing condensation in the layer of air that’s in contact with it or even some other reason that I haven’t thought of, the haze has tended to hang around for weeks taking the edge off the pleasure of flying. We’ll have to wait and see what the next few days dish up for us.

As for what we’ll be flying – on Monday I especially pre-faxed the X’air permit paperwork to the BMAA to ensure that there would be no glitches so we’d have the permit back by today. But sure enough, we found that for some inexplicable reason, our inspector had forgotten to include a passenger in his weight and balance calculations! In my conversations with Deddington, I understood that nevertheless, they had reworked the numbers themselves and that all was OK. Then I thought they said they’d issue the permit anyway as all the numbers checked out. However, true to form, when I checked, the paperwork was still being held in a queue and this morning I was told that the weight and balance paperwork still had to be signed by the inspector! I queried this and very kindly, Jo who does the permits called me up a little while later and said that the permit would be coming out by First Class Post this evening.

So now we’re sweating on the Post Office getting it to Ken by Saturday, the problem being that tomorrow is, of course, the Good Friday Bank Holiday, and if it doesn’t arrive in time, it will not be delivered until Tuesday, losing us the whole of this extended four day week-end! We originally wanted to fly all four days, giving Ken and Peter a chance to experience their aircraft for the first time (albeit with me as P1) and now we’re waiting on tenterhooks to see if that will be possible. If not, it would have to be the following week-end, which is also a four-dayer with the royal wedding and the Spring Bank Holiday on the Monday and also Popham for one of the days for us, but looking that far ahead, who knows what the weather will be like. It would be just our luck for it to be abysmal, losing us another week-end 😯

So I’m planning to fly MYRO anyway tomorrow and Ken says he’d like to come along too. As the wind’s forecast to be from the south-east, I’m planning a flight to the south coast, to Dymchurch, one that I started but had to curtail because of poor weather a few weeks ago. So let’s see how things actually turn out 😉