On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 07:45:58AM +1000, David Olsen wrote:
> North Queensland, winter soaring heaven!!
At Lochiel on Sunday we had John Whittington visit for an Ops Check,
as well as to upgrade one of our instructors to Level 2. He'd never
been ridge soaring before, so we were able to give him a taste of
something a bit different as the wind swung towards the west in the
middle of the day.
With the two seater busy doing checkflights, training flights and
the Level 2 upgrade, we fired-off some singles: Standard Libelle
GTX, Pik-20D WVA, Club Libelle GMI and Ventus GQH shared the ridge
with the Puchatek and a handful of wedgetail eagles. Weak thermals
were being accellerated by the ridge too, with the eagles marking
the best lift over some of the gullies. One of the AEF's from last
week who had come back to take-up training enjoyed the ridge for
an hour; I had over an hour on my conversion flight in the Std
Libelle, everyone else had good flights too (except perhaps Scott,
who decided to treat the 60 kt ridge as an 80 kt ridge and landed
15 minutes later :-)
Later in the day the thermals dried-up, leaving a silky-smooth
laminar ridge -- Like wave, only closer to the ground. The last
pilots landed a few minutes before last light with big smiles on
their faces.
South Australia, winter soaring heaven :-)
The one hiccough: We called-off the Puchatek's hangar run because
we suspected that there was trouble with its release. It turns out
that the pilot (who hadn't flown it from the backseat very much)
was just pulling the knob too gently. So that cost us a long walk
back to the hangars.
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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