La Rochelle here I come!

I phoned STAR this morning as requested and we agreed that as tomorrow will be the last weather window for several more days, they would squeeze me in. But there’s a sting in the tail. They want to do my check first thing in the morning which means my arriving at their workshop by 9.00 am.

I’ve checked the weather and it looks as though I’ll benefit from a light tail wind on the way up (and possibly one on the way back, even) but it means that I must take off from Malbec by at the latest 7.15 am tomorrow morning.

I’ve spoken to ATC who have given me permission to land at La Rochelle (as I’ll be flying an ULM) and they’ll be expecting me at around 8.45 am, so as 77ASY is fuelled up and ready to go, it’s now just a matter of seeing how everything works out. I must admit to being quite excited about the whole thing.

Changing the subject, on Saturday Wim and I noticed that 77ASY’s compass was well out (by around 30 degrees) on some headings and although this hasn’t worried me up to now as I always fly using my GPS, I thought that I ought to do something about it. So this afternoon I swung the compass.

I couldn’t see how to do it in the beginning but the two tiny screws securing a small panel on the face of the compass aren’t used to do the adjustments as I originally thought but instead allow you to pull the face off the unit when they’re removed, giving access to the adjustment screws.

I was quite surprised to find that the error on the N/S axis was actually quite small but that on the E/W axis was huge. Maybe this was something to do with my having removed the old panel top edging, which contained metal, and replaced it with a rubber type that contains none.

Anyway, I did the adjustments as best I could being as I can’t install a compass app on my phone and had to rely on a print out of the yard outside the barn that I took off Google Earth and on which I’d overlaid the N/S and E/W axes. I estimate that the compass error in any direction is now no more than 5 degrees and it’ll be interesting to see how it correlates with my calculated headings during tomorrow’s flight.

Oh well, it’s nearly 7.00 pm… best to think about getting to bed… 😉