Day: April 9, 2015

56NE has been standing out under covers at Galinat since August 2013 and to say that it is in need of a really good clean is an understatement. I’d also like to renew a few nuts and bolts on it and give it a thorough general check-over before our planned flight up the west coast of France in early June. It also came with a complete set of spare wings when I bought it and I stupidly originally fitted the wrong set of covers, so with the list of jobs steadily growing and especially as I’d now like to change the wing covers over, it made sense to get it back to my house where the work can be done more easily.

I got permission from the owner of the field just down the road where I took off from in August 2013 to fly it back in there and as there’s a guy who rents it and is about to put cows on it, there was some urgency for me to get it ferried over ASAP. The weather hasn’t played ball recently because although it’s been dry and bright, the winds have been a bit too high for comfort. However, it looked as though things would improve today so long as I made the flight early in the morning, so as Wim also planned to come over to help me dismantle 56NE, we agreed to fly into the field together at 9.15 am.

For once everything went as planned. As I approached the field, I could see Wim below me turning onto his downwind leg, so I peeled off to give him some time to land and followed him in a few minutes later. The landing was quite ‘interesting’ as the field is below a small hill with trees and a power line on its top. You have to get your speed right down (70 kmh for 56NE), just skim the top of the hill and then push your nose down a bit to hit the right spot on the field. This, of course, adds a bit more airspeed, which is why it’s important to get your speed down as low as you can as you crest the hill, because although the field is pretty long, especially by Dordogne standards, it soon gets used up if you come in too fast and the trees and house at the end of it would loom up pretty fast.

I’d attached my new little sportcam to 56NE before taking off and shot a video of the whole flight, including the takeoff and landing, which you can view by clicking on the following image. In the video, as I taxi back up the field before parking you can see what I mean about the hill with its trees and power line (also visible with part of one of its twin water towers in the image below).

Wim and I then set to to get the wings off 56NE and walk them one after the other the few hundred yards up the road to my house. After we’d done that, Wim walked ahead while I taxied 56NE up the road to my front garden – imagine doing that in the UK, you’d be hung, drawn and quartered if anyone saw you, let alone if a galant law-enforcer actually caught you doing it! So two hours after landing, 56NE was back on my front lawn where it started out from nearly two years ago.

I didn’t have time to start doing any work on it today, so later on I just got it covered up for the night.

So it was a good day’s work. We had a high of 24 degrees Celsius today with wall-to-wall sunshine and it looks as though we can expect more of the same going into next week. So it will be a good time to be airborne but in general things can only get better as from now as the year proceeds, so the sooner I can get the jobs I have in mind finished, the sooner I can get back in the air and enjoying the summer’s flying.