sfGnome

Good on you, Hildy. Now it's time to change the 'Airstrip' and 'Aircraft' entries over there on the left...

Thanks David. I use the weatherzone pages a lot in planning when to book an a/c, but I'd missed the 24hour graphs up till now (and I've tended to rely only on the BOM forecasts - TAF & Area - for the flying days). One more for the armoury!

That was the interesting thing about Friday morning. YSCN metar claimed 3kts, taf predicted a little more, and the windsock told a very different story. Pity the windsock isn't available on-line Kicking myself now that I didn't grab the opportunity to do some circuits with an instructor...

We're intending to fly in and camp under wing, but if the weather doesn't play ball then we'll be driving. It's pretty hard to camp under the wing of a car... To avoid distracting the fine folk at RAA, does anyone know whether you can still camp at the airport if the transport you arrive in never climbs above zero AGL?

A watched pot never boils Hildy... :nonono: (but geez, the waiting's a bummer, eh?) I drove 1 1/2 hours yesterday to fly, got to the strip only to turn around and go home again (there goes 3 hours I'll never get back). Still, it was the right decision. Strong, gusty wind 90 deg to the strip, and no suggestion that it was going to get any calmer. The joys of having a weather-dependent hobby. Please, please, please have nice weather over Easter...

Interesting (lack of) forward view from the Pietenpol. You'd think they could have found somewhere else to put the radiator. Beautifully made though, isn't it?

Thanks!

Cool Hildy! Was that first solo? And apart from getting to 1000AGL before turning crosswind, did it make a difference to the trim? I've never noticed the presence of a passenger affecting the trim before - climb yes, but not trim.

Whatever your instructor says, Hildy!

You last that long? Lucky sod...

Yep, Hildy. Same plane that I was talking about. As for the glide approaches, I'll bet that most of your approaches are already 'glide'. How much do you fiddle with the power? Probably not much if at all. The best landings come from a nice clean set-up in the first place. The only difference with a glide approach is that you're missing your security blanket.

As of this morning, I've decided that you can't generalise about models (well, Der! took me a while ). I've been alternating between a J160 and an LSA-55 and found the LSA to be a fairly sweet little thing, but this morning I took out a different one and it was a pain in the backside to fly. So, when someone tells you that one model is better than another, ask 'em which particular plane they're talking about...

Good stuff Tomo! :thumb_up:

Yen: Yep, the thread started with a discussion of an extra couple of $ per year, but it pretty quickly degenerated into how everyone is being forced into these newfangled restrictions at great cost, and I just can't see how anyone is begin forced to do anything. I assume that there's something I'm missing because I wasn't around then. Methusala: Again, I don't understand. You do have the freedom to fly without ASIC and ADSB. You can fly without a Radio. What freedom don't we have that you're wanting?

Can I ask a serious question? I'm not trying to be controversial - I really don't know the answer. If I wanted to fly a minimal a/c at low heights in the back blocks never straying too far from home, then I'd have to pay my RA membership & Rego. I wouldn't have to pay for any radios and transponders, etc. How is this different from the old 300' and never cross a road rules of the old days? How have the costs for minimal a/c increased?

I can still remember the day I finally remembered to add carby heat without being reminded. Why is that the hard one to remember?? Now you've got me intrigued. What possible job is there that could be better than flying? I've got a great job, but if flying paid the bills then work wouldn't see me for dust! p.s. Back on your gps logging question, I should have mentioned that while gps is remarkably accurate in the horizontal plane, it is much less so in the vertical. Large absolute errors and variations over time are common in the elevation, so even if you wanted to review that aspect, it just isn't worth it. The only value I've found in looking at the elevation trace is to count the number of circuits I did...

Oops! Sorry. How embarrasment...

I recall back when I was an apprentice, one of the engineers telling stories of his mini cooper which was tuned for Avgas (he was a keen skydiver, so just filled it up once a week at the airport). Apparently his favourite trick was to take Yank servicemen our here on R&R for a drive through the mountains. Not only had they never seen a car that small, they'd never gone around a corner that fast either...

Yep, what Neil said! :thumb_up:

Hey Rach, just do the Jimmy Choo / sneaker shuffle. Wear the pretty watch until you get in the plane, and then do the quick swaperoo to the functional one (which at my age is one with nice big numbers... )

Folks, have a look at what Hildy said in his first post. "If you look at the track side-on in google earth...". He isn't using GPS to as a navigation tool in the circuit, he's using it to review his flight performance back home in the comfort of his computer chair. I did (and still do) exactly the same thing with a small portable GPS recorder that sits tucked out of the way, silently remembering what I've done. When I was learning circuits, it taught me that those nice 90deg turns were anything but, and these days I still review every flight later that night for track and altitude accuracy. Hildy, the most likely reason that your altitude track doesn't look as expected is that the GPS will be 'smoothing' the recorded path - it assumes that a sudden change in direction (ie no longer descending) must be wrong, and so it continues your downward path for a little while. You may be able to remove the smoothing if you dig around in the configuration of the GPS or in the program that you use to upload the data, but I wouldn't worry too much. You know with much more accuracy whether you hit the ground hard or rounded out too high than any GPS recorder ever will. (p.s. I just looked at your track. Given that I can see where you wandered around in the instructors office and when you did the pre-flight check, I'm guessing you were using a sports gps watch. Right? :thumb_up:)

I just went straight to work. Borrrrrring...

Two solos in one day - bet it was nice to know that the first one wasn't a fluke!

I'm with you Nev. I'd love to be building, but I like doing things like that with other people. So far I've built 2 houses and assisted on two others, and I built 2 Minis from wrecks in my younger days (yep, Darky - real Minis, none of this pretend stuff ). Yep, I reckon if I wasn't flying then I'd be building - well, if someone would deposit large sums of moolah in my bank account that is!

Can't see why not. From the evidence in your picture it's a single prop A/C, so unless it exceeds the RA weight limits you should be fine...