Outstanding! Absolutely fantastic! As I drove down Wrotham Hill heading for Linton I could see quite a large area before me all covered with thick haze, so I wasn’t feeling too optimistic. Flyable, OK, but with the edge taken off because of the haze, a bit like last week-end. And my feeling wasn’t helped when I arrived at the petrol station at Linton to find it closed. I couldn’t believe it, and not knowing where the next closest one was, I decided that I had no choice but to head towards Maidstone…. where there was a parade in the town centre at exactly the same time and the traffic was almost grid-locked as a result. I ended up the other side of Maidstone heading out on the Chatham road and by the time I’d filled my jerry cans and got back to Linton…. where the petrol station was now open again, I’d lost over half an hour.<\/p>\n
But all of this was forgotten when we took off. Originally Ken was going to come with me but Peter came instead because up to now, he’s never flown in a microlight before. As MYRO climbed out from Linton I knew immediately that it was going to be a fantastic flight. The sky was totally clear with practically no cloud yet the air was almost perfectly smooth. Usually you get thermic ups and downs in such conditions, but there was almost nothing of that at all. And by the time we took off, the haze had almost cleared as well.<\/p>\n
We headed off on a south-easterly heading, towards Lydd and made the coast just a bit north of the Lydd zone. Then we descended to low level over the sea and flew up to Dymchurch after which we climbed and turned left to head for Ashford and the return to Linton. Everything went like clockwork. I got a bit concerned about fuel as the flight progressed and with good reason as it turned out. By the time we joined overhead, where we were almost run down by a stupid GA jockey who was flying where he shouldn’t have been (ie overhead an active airfield, Linton) at a height he shouldn’t have been at (ie 1500 ft), and landed we ended up with only about 7 or 8 minutes more fuel left in the tank, much too close for comfort.<\/p>\n
So a great flight but I really do need to get my second tank mod sorted to give me more range and a greater margin of safety. But that’s for another day – what’s left of today is for musing over and appreciating the enjoyment that we were lucky to have had today \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Outstanding! Absolutely fantastic! As I drove down Wrotham Hill heading for Linton I could see quite a large area before me all covered with thick haze, so I wasn’t feeling too optimistic. Flyable, OK, but with the edge taken off because of the haze, a bit like last week-end. And my feeling wasn’t helped when … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2346,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2289\/revisions\/2346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}