Wim’s Weedhopper

Last Sunday was a beautiful day here – crisp, dry and sunny. Wim invited me over for a cup of tea and said that as he hadn’t flown for a few weeks and wanted to start and warm up his aircraft’s engine, we could meet up at his piste on the hill over on the other side of Plazac. Wim was waiting in his 4 x 4 on the approach road when I arrived because he thought that the ground further up would be too wet and soft for my car and he was right. Wim’s piste is surrounded by an electric fence because the field that it’s in usually contains cows, but they weren’t there on Sunday and in a few minutes Wim had his little aircraft out and running.

Wim has a single seat Weedhopper which bears a remarkable resemblance to MYRO because apart from having just the one seat that makes it narrower, it is constructed from many of the same parts. And as it has the same engine as MYRO, when it was running and ready to go it looked and sounded very similar too. Because Wim’s piste slopes down slightly at one end, unless the wind is quite strong, he takes off towards the down-hill end and lands in the other direction. Wim decided he’d make a short flight and as the wind was quite light, that’s exactly what he did on Sunday. If you click on the pic below, you’ll be able to see a short video that I took of it, the first I’ve taken of a microlight flight since I’ve been here!

Like my X-Air, Wim’s Weedhopper doesn’t have doors fitted and with what he was wearing at the time, five or ten minutes was enough on Sunday. It didn’t take long after landing to taxi the aircraft off the runway, switch off and push it back into the little hangar, and only a few minutes later we were at Wim’s house eating biscuits and drinking tea. This is what microlighting is all about down here in this part of France and I can’t wait for the time when I am doing exactly the same thing in my X-Air 🙂