Jodel

At our club's open day I was fortunate to win a fantastic raffle prize, a flight in one of our member's aeroplane.

Hilary & I Ready To Fly

This was a Jodel DR1050 and the flight was from Wellesbourne airfield in Warwickshire on 25th October 2014. The day had started quite breezy and wet and though the rain subsided by the afternoon it was still quite breezy; if I remember correctly it was blwoing at 20% to the strip. My wife Hilary came along too and after our pilot, Steve, had completed all the ground checks we set off down the strip. I could certainly feel the breeze as the aeroplane worked up towards take-off speed and then off we went in the general direction of Evesham. Soon after that Steve asked me if I'd like to take control, hah, can a duck swim!

Jodel DR1050

We passed Stratford on Avon on our right, Evesham on our left and continued in the general direction of Pershore until we reached the Stensham Services on the M6 at which point we turned back towards Wellesbourne. Well, I’ve had my hands on the controls of an aeroplane once or twice before but bouncing around in the breeze was a new experience and I have to say I quite enjoyed it. Of course Steve landed the aeroplane, which in the conditions was, erm, rather attention grabbing.





It was a great flight and I'd love to do it again.

Great Orme Re-visited

Last week I revisited the Great Orme for some more sloping. The “rock” is a slope glider’s paradise with lovely smooth lift to fly in.

If I recall correctly the wind was around 25mph which is fine and gave me the opportunity to fly my "Sailplanes International Secret Weapon". It a bit of a mouthful so I just call it my Sloperider. I've beefed up some of the control wires and I was keen to see how it behaved. It behaved very well indeed and I enjoyed a good long flight, the time always comes for a landing though and all seemed to be going well for a nice landing in the designated landing area. Just as I expected it to touch down it floated for a moment, just enough to stop it's forward speed an few inches off the ground and a minor stall followed. No great problem really, just that it sheered of one of the aileron servos arms ending it's flights for the day in the process.

No problem though, I had several other models with me. My fairly new Wicked Wing and my now old faithful SAS Fusion. The both behaved as expected and several hours of flying followed.

Thee several other slope flyers at various times and I had arranged to meet my friend Tim Mackey who as usual had something special with him. On this occasion it was a maiden flight for his model of an AVRO Vulcan XH558 which had a little surprise of it's own. It flew very well and produced a noticable but not in anyway loud whine fron the air passing over it's surface; amazingly realistic. Think I might end with one of those!

On the whole it was a really nice autumn day. It was a little cool when the sun when in but in the sunshine it was pretty comfortable really.

The day ended with another beautiful sunset and happily an uneventful journey home.