First flight of the year

The weather’s been pretty mediocre since my sister and brother-in-law left for home and I’ve been waiting a while for an opportunity to get some air under 56NE’s wings. So when Sunday turned out to be a lovely bright day with light winds I was sorely tempted, but as I hadn’t got any fuel ready and was doing something else anyway, I gave it a miss, knowing that the forecast for Monday was just as good.

And so it turned out – better if anything – and I loaded the flight I had planned into my Asus tablet and set off for Galinat after lunch. Here’s a shot showing the route I’d planned on taking – north-east to Terrasson, turning north-west overhead the ULM airfield there, then on a westerly dog-leg (into the sun, unfortunately) turning eventually to head back to Galinat overhead Milhac, the airfield with the tiny runway that Wim and I dropped into last year.

It was the first time that I’d got 56NE’s covers off since the winter and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it’d fared. One seat, the passenger’s luckily, was still a bit damp after the storm of a week or so ago, but overall it was still in very good shape, clean and free of rust marks. I refuelled (as best I could as I found that I’d forgotten my funnel), gave the screen a bit of a clean and after a good all-round check, was ready to go with the temperature around 17 degrees Celsius.

The flight went well and as I’d wrapped up well, I actually felt quite warm. It got a bit cooler towards the end, though, when the sun disappeared below a curtain of high cloud, so I was glad that I’d put on my gloves and my little woolly hat! I used my new sports cam for the first time, having decided to at the last minute, grabbing it as I walked out of the door. As I hadn’t charged the battery fully since the last time that I’d used it, it only lasted for 45 minutes and so didn’t record the whole flight, which was just on an hour. Even so, the resulting video didn’t turn out too badly after editing it down, and it can be viewed by clicking on the following image.