Excellent flight!

I carried out maintenance on my X-Air and gave it a thorough clean right back in the first week of August and have been waiting ever since to test fly it. I couldn’t at the time because the weather wasn’t favourable enough and then later in the month I went off to the UK in my Savannah, so it still remained unflown. Since I got back we’ve been subjected to excessive winds that have continued to keep the X-Air grounded but as my friend Wim pointed out on Monday, this afternoon was likely to be acceptable.

And it was. I wanted the conditions to be as suitable for a test flight as possible as although I’ve carried out multiple taxies up and down the runway at Malbec together with several engine tests at take off power, these things can always be unpredictable. But today it looked as though although the winds wouldn’t be totally calm, with the possibility even of a small tail-wind on landing, conditions in general would be OK.

I did another taxy and high power engine test and was going to do another, but the results were so good that I decided not to and took off anyway.

My intention was to just fly around in the vicinity of the airfield and then land back. In fact things went so well with exhaust gas and water temperatures rock solid in range and fuel pressure at a constant 0.3 bar, just as it should be, that I eventually ventured a bit further afield, to Thonac and overhead Galinat to see how it looks now that it’s closed (its owner, Christian, unfortunately passed away at around the time of Covid and there’s no news about what’s going to happen to it in the future).

I also took in Rouffignac as shown in the next shot.

The T & P readings remained perfect so after an hour or so I decided that it was time to head back for a landing at Malbec. The next shot was taken as I approached Fleurac.

And here’s a shot taken just before touching down at Malbec with everything looking good. Take a look at the windsock. Although a light southerly tailwind had been forecast in fact there was a cross wind from the north-east, a complete turnaround!

In many ways the results of the test flight were bitter-sweet because it now means that I can advertise 24ZN for sale. Yes, I need to sell it because as I’ve said on several occasions, I don’t have the time to fly two aircraft and aircraft need to be flown, not become hangar queens. In some ways I’ll be sorry to see it go though, as my association with it goes right back to June 2008, not long after I started My Trike, when I found G-BYPW as she then was for my friend Ken up in north-west England. That’s over 16 years. Many people don’t even stay married for that long 😐