Back in The Swing Again!

A brief window of opportunity to fly opened up on Wednesday afternoon. It was very windy during the morning but was forecast to calm down later in the day. After speaking to Niels we decided to go for a trip after work. I didn't have my flying kit with me but Neils had his and so we were in business. No flight bag meant no camera and so no photos this time.

We got to the airfield at 6pm and thought we'd go to Mona to do some circuits. However, we couldn't get anyone to answer the phone and so a rethink was needed. We decided on Sherburn and got airborne at 6:40pm. With a good tailwind we were soon sailing through the Leeds Southern CTA at 2800ft, at one point with 155kts groundspeed (although we were decending to 2000ft at the time). Leeds advised us of a helicopter heading towards us which we soon spotted before turning to head directly to Sherburn for an overhead join to runway 29 tarmac.

It was four weeks since I'd been able to fly so I was keen to practice take offs and landings and quickly got through three before taxying in to get a coffee. There were no other aircraft flying and I had the circuit to myself. Very nice. My landings were ok but I felt a little rusty and knew I could do better.

Niels took over for our flight back to Barton which was uneventful as we retraced the route we followed outbound. We joined for 27Right and Niels pulled off a good landing. I fancied a few more circuits so we swapped over and I managed 4 and one go around. I was feeling much better now and was happy I was getting back my sharpness. It's all about confidence and practise!

Flying is definately like a drug problem: it's expensive and addictive and you always want more.

I hope my next fix will not be too far off.

May Update

Well it's been a pretty grim few weeks as far as flying is concerned. Number of trips planned three, number of trips completed Nil.

We failed to get to a fly in at Pilling Sands in the helicopter as the weather was miserable, last week's jolly was abandoned for the same reason and this weekend's fly out to Troyes in France has been cancelled as the actual and forecast weather is very poor. We'll try again on another weekend.

It's hard to be optimistic about our weather: it's just so depressing, week after week of low cloud, rain, high winds or all three at once. It has to improve soon and when it does maybe I can make up for all this sitting around.