Weird wind

This post is all about today’s flight, but first a few words about yesterday. I got hold of the fuses that are needed for the X-Air and also the various sockets and plugs that we need before deciding what will be the best to fit. The previous owners had a GPS that was connected by a cable that just hangs down below the panel but it isn’t compatible with the GPS that Ken has. So we have decided just to remove it and as the X-Air approved wiring has an ‘aux’ socket, we will fit either a car cigar lighter socket or a DIN socket instead in one of the holes left by the voltmeter that we removed previously. We decided to leave it for now though, until the X-Air has been signed off from its permit inspection, hopefully next week-end. Unfortunately, the exhaust wasn’t back from its re-welding so after refitting the newly re-painted main wheels and spats, that was all we could do on it this week-end.

So now on to today. The weather forecast looked very good – broken cloud, sunny spells and winds from the south-west at about 12 mph with the occasional mild gust. So I planned a flight down to Bexhill during which I’d descend to sea level and fly all the way along the seafront from Bexhill to Hastings before turning left to return to Linton. The cloud turned out to be roughly 4/8 broken cumulus with around a 2500ft cloud base and the wind roughly as expected. However, as I flew south the conditions began to change, and alarmingly so. The cloud cover changed to 5/8, say, and although the wind continued from the south-west it began to produce some of the most powerful gusts that I have ever experienced in a microlight aircraft. At one stage, a gust was so severe that it lifted the right wing and I had the aileron hard over onto the stop with the wing still lifting. Even though I was able to put in a boot-full of right rudder to help counteract it, it wasn’t a very nice feeling at all and at the time, because there had been little or no warning, with no signs of the gusts building beforehand, I even wondered if it was due to something having gone wrong with the aircraft or its controls. Not very nice at all flying with full right aileron and having to control the bank with rudder which, fortunately, the AX3 has in plenty. And to top it all, there were also some areas of fairly extreme lift under the patches of low cumulus, even under some of the small, quite innocuous looking bits, that had MYRO shooting up at 1000ft/minute or quite possibly more, every now and again.

The powerful gusting happened a couple more times, but not as severely as the first, so I thought it a good time to curtail the flight and head back north away from the coast. Although I still kept experiencing some quite extreme lift as I dodged under the patches of low cumulus, I didn’t have anything like the same problems as before with the wing lifting in the gusts. This may have been because with the wind coming from the left and with me in the left seat, MYRO was inherently a bit more stable. I got back to Linton with no further major incident and joined overhead to land on runway 29. It was very clear from the approach that the wind had picked up considerably from when I’d taken off, which it hadn’t been forecast to do, and there was quite a strong left cross-wind needing quite a lot of crabbing on final. But anyway, I increased my approach speed to cope and had the knowledge that if necessary, I could land on the long main runway if I needed to, but I landed safely anyway on the shorter winter runway.

I had the camcorder running during the flight and made a nice recording of the landing. Unfortunately, despite renewing the Lithium batteries in my headset, there is still a problem with the sound so unfortunately that’s something I need to investigate further. If I can put together a half-decent ‘silent’ movie later on, I’ll include it on the Video Gallery.

Today was a real learning experience. I don’t know where today’s weird winds came from but I saw for the first time just how disconcerting strong, gusting cross-winds can be when you’re flying a small light aircraft and it’s an experience that I’ll not forget in a hurry 😯