Friday, April 25, 2008

A beautiful day for a flight...

What a fantastic day! I went for a flight today of 1.2 hours starting around 10:30 am. The surface wind on takeoff was variable at 3 knots, and when I came back, 180 degrees at 4 knots. Absolutely awesome!

I took up Piper Archer PA28-181, ZK-TDJ by myself for some much-needed/wanted practice of forced landings, stalls and turns. Being such a fantastic day, I did an Eastbourne departure, out by Mount Matthews to the southern Wairarapa area. After few turns, stalls and FLWOP practices, I headed back via the Pencarrow arrival procedure.

Sorry, no pictures [I was too busy flying].

As an aside, I was listening to Christchurch Info most of the time. It was interesting hearing of the SPAR at Hamilton [3000 meters viz and broken at 400 feet if I remember rightly?], and the interesting radio calls from pilots around the country... a bit of patience and some accurate position reporting could have helped one or two of them I think :-(

1 comment:

Flyinkiwi said...

Friday was an interesting day in the Tron. It started with fog so thick the Clubrooms were getting buzzed with aircraft on the missed approach. I heard an ATR, a A320 and a Q300 all go around. Finally it was the ATR who popped out of the low cloud and landed at around 10am. The A320 had diverted and the Q300 was up in the hold but landed later. As for the rest of the excitement, well thats reserved for my latest blog entry.