Eh? What? How?

Sometimes I think we just have to admit that there are forces at work about which we know very little and over which we have no control. My experiences today were a case in point.

I’ve had a flight planned for my Savannah, for quite some time actually, and today seemed like an ideal day for it. I’ve tried previously on a couple of occasions to do it but have been thwarted both times because of the weather. But this morning looked as though it was going to be perfect, with very light winds, lowish temperatures and a little bit of cloud that taken together would make for very good, smooth flying conditions.

I arrived at Malbec fairly early and the visibility out to the south wasn’t too bad. There was some low level cloud in the river valley which wasn’t really surprising and wasn’t going to trouble me, so I carried on and prepared 77ASY for flight. I wanted to record the flight so mounted one GoPro under the right wing, as I have previously, and a second in the cabin with a connection into my radio. I tested the arrangement a few weeks ago and was looking forward to trying it out in the air.

I warmed the Savannah’s engines up before starting up the videos and was all set to go by about 09.45 am. Here are some shots that I took before restarting the engine ready for take off.

Then I climbed in and took off confident that all was well and that my two GoPros would be recording events thereafter. But it turned out that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

I became used to my cheap Chinese sportscams regularly letting me down when I tried to make recordings of flights as a result of batteries failing, the cameras switching themselves off unexpectedly for no reason and whatever, but I’ve always been able to rely on my GoPros. But not today apparently. In the event I decided to abort the flight due to low cloud in the direction I was heading and returned to Malbec, only remaining airborne for 35 minutes. But I thought that I’d at least have my recordings to view afterwards.

But not so. The GoPro that I’d installed under the wing recorded… nothing. Nada. No video at all. I do not understand how that could have happened. I switched it on, pressed the ‘record’ button and heard it beep. The two buttons are separate so there can have been no confusion and the GoPro was connected to a power bank to give it plenty of recording time, but after the flight I found that the GoPro itself was switched off and the power bank was still at 100% charge. Go figure.

But it gets even more weird. Not having a video from my first GoPro, I at least thought that I’d have one from my second one, and I did have. But I noticed when I was transferring it onto my PC that it was only two minutes or so long and couldn’t understand what was happening. Until I played it back for the first time that is, and found that it showed the whole flight but at more than 10 times normal speed!

I couldn’t understand how this could have happened – until I checked the GoPro and found that it was set up to record in Timewarp mode – no, me neither. I’d never heard of such a thing previously and when I checked found that it’s a special GoPro slow motion mode with smoothing, but when I tried to switch it back to normal recording, I found that I couldn’t! In fact I had to do a factory reset on the GoPro.

But that wasn’t the end of it. I set both of my GoPros to record in 2.7k video quality rather than 4k to save on file size, my newer GoPro 8 in 2.7k 30 fps and this older GoPro 7 in 2.7k 25 fps. I then found that not only had it been changed to Timewarp mode, it had also been changed to 1080p 60 fps, how I do not know as nobody other than me has any access whatsoever to the two cameras.

So there you are – mysteriouser and mysteriouser, as Alice in Wonderland said. I was able to view the video but as the GoPro doesn’t record frames continuously in Timewarp mode but instead leaves a gap between each one, the results look like a video shot in the 1900’s. However, I could lift still images from it and a few are shown below to show the course of the flight, starting with the take off which, thankfully, was quite normal.

Less than 10 minutes into the flight it was already becoming evident that low cloud was becoming a problem that looked like it would get worse the further south I flew.

And indeed it did.

I could see Sarlat-Domme over to my right with low cloud to its south-east and after deciding to abort the flight and return to Malbec, I reconsidered and turned towards Sarlat with the idea of doing a touch-and-go there.

However, experience tells you that in aviation, having made a decision it’s best to stick to it, so I dropped the idea and turned onto a heading to return to Malbec. The next shot shows that there was already quite a build-up of cloud between me and it.

Here are a couple of shots from when I was on final approach for Malbec.

The next shot was taken during the flare to land.

This shot was from just after touch-down.

The final shot was from ascending to the top of the runway to the area outside the barn.

So all in all, today has been a really weird day. What happened with my GoPros is, and will probably always remain, a complete mystery to me. The flight itself was OK for what it was, a 35 minute local jolly in relatively poor conditions. So yet again I was thwarted in being unable to complete my planned flight, but at least this time I did get into the air – and back again safely. Here’s hoping I get a chance to try again soon – with my GoPros all reset and ready to go as well.