Flight 7 September

We had some pretty nice weather last week while my life was being disrupted by my telephone and internet problems, so I was bent on getting at least one decent flight in by way of compensation. However, when it gets hot down here during the day it also gets very thermic, which can make for some very uncomfortable flying as I’d found out when I flew out to Vergt on 18 August. That’s why lots of pilots fly early in the morning or in the early evening, when conditions can be almost perfect. I left it too late on Saturday because at this time of the year you need to be back on the ground by 7.45 pm to give enough time to put the aircraft to bed before it gets too dark, so I decided that Sunday it would be and gave myself plenty of time to fuel up 56NE and get airborne. Lucky that, as I had to return home after starting out having forgotten to bring some sticky-backed dacron that I’d recently purchased and needed to put over a small slit that I’d carelessly put into an aileron skin with my thumbnail while re-fitting the covers a few weeks ago.

I had a flight already loaded into my satnav, as shown below, that was planned to take about 52 minutes. The dark green line shows my planned route and the red one the track I actually flew.

I planned to fly north-west up towards Périgueux flying close enough to get a view of Bassillac airport and taking in Boulazac and Trélissac where all the big stores and warehouse outlets are to the east of the city and Périgueux itself, before turning south over the motorway to Bordeaux and heading back south-east to return to Galinat. I got away at 6.37 pm and immediately knew that my timing was perfect. I was only wearing shorts and a tee shirt and after the heat of the day, the air felt warm against my arm. But despite the heat, the air was perfectly smooth, and so it remained for the whole of the flight. Unfortunately, I knew that at that time of the day the sun wasn’t going to be very sympathetic to any photographs that I took and also that most of the main ‘sights’ would be on the other side of the aircraft from where I was seated, but I hoped to get a few decent ones nevertheless.

As I headed off to the north-west I saw my house pass under my starboard wing and 20 minutes or so later was approaching Périgueux Bassillac airport. It isn’t as grand as the name might suggest and that’s it in the large ‘clearing’ behind the wing strut in the shot below.

And then on to the adjacent commercial area of Boulazac/Trélissac.

I didn’t really expect to get any decent pictures of Périgueux itself but took a few pointing my camera out of the other side of the aircraft, of which the following two were the best.

Four or five minutes after leaving Bassillac behind me, I turned over the motorway interchange to the south of Périgueux to begin my return journey to Galinat. It was a surprisingly uninteresting sight with very little to see but I took a shot nevertheless 😉

The short southerly leg took me to my final waypoint, Eglise-Nueve-de-Vergt, where I turned to the south-east to head back towards Thonac. There was hardly anything to see there either, but I decided to take a photograph anyway.

Twenty minutes later, I was turning final for a landing back at Galinat and a touch-down that was the closest you could ever get to a ‘greaser’ on Galinat’s rather bumpy, it has to be said, grass surface. The whole flight took 53 minutes and averaged exactly 60 mph in conditions that were as near perfect as they could ever be. I went home well satisfied with a broad grin on my face after my trials and tribulations with Orange and a feeling that the world isn’t such a bad place after all 🙂