Cracking good flight, Grommit!

I’m typing this at just gone 4.15 pm and it’s another scorching hot afternoon with the temperature up at around 35 degrees Celsius. So not a good time to go flying in an ultralight aircraft because you’d be thrown all over the place in extreme thermal conditions. But I don’t care, because I got my flight in first thing this morning.

I did my planning yesterday and tanked up my Weedhopper, 28AAD, so I could get away without too much delay. My aim was to be airborne by 8.30 am but in the event it was 20 minutes later, so not too bad. My idea was to fly a circuit of the Bergerac Class D control zone landing at Ste Foy la Grande and Belvès on the way before returning to Malbec as shown below.

I unfortunately forgot to take my camera and had to use my phone camera instead so the shots that I took were of very poor quality in comparison. I’d hoped to compensate for them by having a video record of the flight but yet again I was let down by my cheap Chinese Go-Pro copy.

It seems that the latest trick on Ali Baba is either for sellers to send cameras with faults that they know will not be worth the postage to return or to pass off cameras with 1080p resolution as being 4K. I’ve been caught out both ways now and as a result have stopped using Ali Baba because they always support the seller and you end up buying a junk camera for half price. I’ve now got a collection of them.

The one that I strapped onto the Weedhopper today is a 4K camera but with a faulty lens that makes the whole of the left hand side of the image totally blurred. So not much good for anything really. I’ll go through my collection one at a time in the future and see exactly what I’ve been left with, but I know it will be a sorry collection.

Today’s one after recording the take offs at Malbec and Ste Foy also didn’t keep running long enough to record the landings despite being connected to a power pack and as a result I didn’t even bother restarting it at Belvès.

Here are the shots that I took of 28AAD at Ste Foy la Grande.

And here are the shots of it at Belvès.

I got talking with a very friendly guy at Belvès who is just visible taking a picture of 28AAD in one of the shots. He introduced me to the acting club president and I was given a warm invitation to go back any time, which was very kind. The aero club recently suffered a tragic loss with the death of their president in a terrible landing accident in which he crashed and died in a Cessna 172 so it was good to see life continuing there as normal in spite of that event.

But I had to bid my farewell before the thermals started building too much and soon after left them behind for my flight back to Malbec. It only took 20 minutes and I had the pleasure of achieving a super landing there despite the thermals beginning to bubble up a bit on final. It was the perfect end to a perfect flight of just over 2 1/2 hours.

28AAD is a pleasure to fly, being very stable and easy to trim in conditions like today. This means that it’s very easy to hold height and heading without having to constantly put in control inputs in the way that I seem to remember that I had to with MYRO.

And as I suspected, I also seem to be getting a better cruise speed with the prop that I cut down and fitted, 85+ rather than 80 kmh as with MYRO at 5400 rpm together with a slightly better fuel consumption, 13 litres/hour compared to about 15 for MYRO with the same engine.

So taken all round I’m very pleased with how 28AAD has turned out. I’m looking to flight test 56NE, my X-Air, this Sunday or Monday before putting it up for sale but I’ll be hanging onto 28AAD together with my Savannah. At least for now anyway 😉