Winter High Time….

20/12/2007 by Murray Hay.

After a FANTASTIC week of personal flying the weekend was looking to be a lot less intensive for me as many of the members & students were ‘booked’ to do family stuff, mainly involving a jolly fat man in a red flying suit! I wonder if he was telling Nair’s crew about some of his mid winter epic XC flights?

Sat was a meet up with just Duncan for the first of two days planned flying, taking the ’student free’ chance to fly a favorite technical site of mine which as Duncan mentions in his post was a new site for him. From my normal parking spot it was a 5 min hike for Duncan to the ’second site’ launch point of this split site (two owners, both requiring the private site to be ‘booked’) for me it was the shooting range cliff launch and then ’jump the gap’ to fly along to the mid cliff landing zone, keeping the wing up to jog up the rock face to show Duncan the layout/pull up and launch areas for the day.

Due to the highly technical nature launches at this stepped cliff site mean even long term members need to go through the full site brief, however once in the air the flying here once ’sussed’ is often very easy, the main issue on this day being the x-wind factor leading to fast down wind beats but easier launches and landings

 Flying was in lovely warm conditions with the inversion making it feel more like Autumn rather than mid winter, even the inversion haze was not an issues at it was mostly below the flying site take off and landing altitudes. Part way through the day then again at the end of flying we were joined up on the hill by one of the landowners and his son on their dirt bikes, as a 1,000hr GA pilot he often comes up to chat about aviation in general but is yet to have a flight on the tandem..

Checking the conditions at the top of Dundee Law, prior to meeting Duncan

Sunday saw Jonathan across to further build on the flying tasks he had been practicing at Morrone the previous weekend. the pickup loaded it was up to the low hill launch as the ‘top field’ part of the site was (at that time of the day) still below the inversion layer and almost still, but a couple of 100ft up at the low launch the windsock showed 10ft above the ground there was a nice steady 10kt wind almost directly up slope.

The first part of the day was taken up with JR practicing tricky “double bounce” launches with the wing on the ground only in about a couple of knots breeze… a delicate touch required! With steady progress and a lot of short flights completed… 2 mins back to launch point by 4×4 so no walking required ;-) Duncan arrived midday from the Aberdeen area, and it was now time to shift further up the hill to the mid launch area for a lot more flights & retrives, finaly another shift to the top area after 2pm, flying from where Duncan had hiked up to earlier.

The day was lots of good flights for JR, with the delicate launches and ground control all coming together nicely and the bigger flights giving him time to both enjoy the view more and work on turns and fine tuning both the variations in approach path and the landings (also getting better and better).

The last flight was about 20 mins after Duncan’s last one and the first one for JR from next the masts, with a bit of ‘air to air’ filming (shortly to be added to YouTube) it was a ‘hard’ cut back to the hill for me to spot in next the 4×4 to drive down and collect JR.

 A GREAT DAYS flying and training… the only issue being a wrong turn on the drive down resulting in the pickup being nearside ‘nose down’ in a BIG hole… (about 2 1/2 foot air gap under the rear wheel on the drivers side!) fortunately the trick with putting on the handbrake (to lock the rear wheels) put all the power to the front wheels and a drive back out of the hole! 10 mins later and a ‘alternative’ route saw the 4×4 down at the landing field to pick up JR and drive him back to the farm and his car ready for the long drive back to the west coast.

Murray Hay (VERY Glad for all practice driving 4×4’s while doing commercial photographic work on ‘off road’ courses over the years!)

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