{"id":5303,"date":"2013-09-21T20:46:56","date_gmt":"2013-09-21T19:46:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=5303"},"modified":"2013-09-22T11:10:53","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T10:10:53","slug":"great-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/great-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"Great fun!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wim knew that I wanted to fly today so he phoned this morning and suggested that we might go together – he in his Weedhopper and me in 56NE. The trouble was that although the weather forecast was for virtually cloud-free skies and a temperature of 22\/23 degrees Celsius, at the time he phoned it was still overcast with hill fog. In fact, not only couldn’t I see the other side of the valley where Galinat is, from my house, but I also couldn’t see beyond the end of the field opposite. We knew that the low cloud would probably burn off, but the question was, by when. <\/p>\n

In fact it cleared with plenty of time for us to meet at Galinat as agreed, at around 2.00pm and as I got 56NE ready to fly, I heard and saw Wim flying in from his strip at Fleurac. He shut down his engine after landing but within a few minutes I was ready to go and he started it up again and took off. As this would be the first time we had properly flown together (I’d followed Wim over to Galinat in my first flight in 56NE when I’d taken off from the cow field near my house) I said that I’d follow him leaving a reasonable distance between our aircraft so I could gauge the difference in cruising speeds and see how stable 56NE was flying at around 80 kmh, which is less than optimal. In fact it wasn’t difficult controlling the distance between our aircraft but I did find that because 56NE was flying at a high angle of attack, the extra drag made me use higher engine revs than I otherwise would have in the cruise, even though I was flying more slowly. <\/p>\n

After take off we turned left to follow the river V\u00e9z\u00e8re down to Les Eyzies, which I’d done previously when I flew down to Castillonnes. Then I watched Wim sweep round to the right as we headed back up to Fleurac. We flew over the chateau as I did in my previous flight but this time I spotted Wim and Sophie’s house easily, which I couldn’t do before. Then we continued up to Rouffignac and when he arrived there, I saw Wim sweep round to the right again, which I did too several moments later. That took us on a heading towards Plazac and as Wim was then going to land at his strip, he started to descend. I carried on at the same altitude and was surprised how difficult it was to keep his aircraft in constant sight against the textures and colours of the ground at this time of year. I watched as he turned onto final and then turned my attention to my own landing at Galinat.<\/p>\n

I had an amusing experience. Whereas I’ve spotted Galinat without too much difficulty each time I’ve flown previously, this time I was a bit too blase and found myself lined up on an adjacent farmer’s field which I was surprised to find looked very similar from a distance. The clue was that as I approached it, it turned out to be far too scruffy to possibly be Galinat, so I decided to do an over-pass and look for Galinat, which I immediately spotted to my left, a little bit lower down the hillside. It was easy enough to safely double-back in a large S turn for an approach and landing on the correct runway this time, and although it all went well, it served as a little lesson that you can’t afford to relax too much down here, until you’re sure you’ve spotted your destination airfield and runway.<\/p>\n

Although I didn’t pre-plan the flight into my new little satnav, I did have it running to record the track of the flight, which you can see below. The sharp left and right turns to land at Galinat can be clearly seen in the image.<\/p>\n

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I’ve checked the speed profile of the flight and sure enough, it comes out to an average of around 50 mph (80 kmh) which is roughly the speed at which Wim’s Weedhopper flies. However, it’s noticeable that it varies between roughly 40 mph at times when I was climbing, and 60 mph, as I tried to maintain my distance from Wim’s aircraft. I’ll need to watch this in future, as although 40 mph is above 56NE’s stall speed, it’s not that far above it.<\/p>\n

I had another amusing experience after I’d landed. As I taxied round to where I park 56NE, a figure in tee shirt and shorts appeared out of the bushes clutching a camera. After starting to speak in French, he turned out to be an American visitor named Mark who was renting a house locally with a group of friends. He related how he’d watched me fly around, line up and land and seemed quite excited by the whole thing. He said that he wasn’t a pilot himself but that he was very interested and could I take a picture of him sitting in the aircraft? I agreed of course, and he eventually went off the proud owner of a couple of shots taken from each side of the aircraft \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

But that wasn’t the end of it. Just afterwards, a middle-aged French couple stopped and asked me the way to someone’s house, who turned out to be the owner of Galinat. So I gave them directions, and off they went too. In the meantime, I had been tweaking some of my tie-down ropes and putting on 56NE’s covers. I then had another visitor, who turned out to be the owner of the single engine aircraft in the hangar at Galinat. It turned out that he’s unable to fly because its certificate has expired and needs renewing but we had to spend several minutes chatting, of course, and catching up on the latest Galinat gossip.<\/p>\n

The outcome of chatting with all these visitors was that I didn’t get away from the airfield until nearly one and a half hours after I’d landed, but then again, that’s half of the fun of flying, isn’t it \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wim knew that I wanted to fly today so he phoned this morning and suggested that we might go together – he in his Weedhopper and me in 56NE. The trouble was that although the weather forecast was for virtually cloud-free skies and a temperature of 22\/23 degrees Celsius, at the time he phoned it … 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-5303","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\/5303","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=5303"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5317,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303\/revisions\/5317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.micro-trike.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}