Auckland Quick Visit #4: The Mighty Grumman [and Jase the instructor]

Next stop on my Auckland Quick Visit was the Auckland Aero Club. Until I moved to Wellington, I had been the Club Captain for 3 years [and a member for longer than that], so it was good to go back [as an aside, the Cafe at the Aero Club is still very good, and well worth a visit if you need a feed]. The actual reason for the visit was to meet up with my mate Jason. If I'm not mistaken, when I left, Jason either just had, or was soon to get, a CPL. Now he has a C-Cat Instructor rating and is practicing for his B-Cat. Jason and I were both into formation flying and just "doing the club stuff", so it was really good to catch up.

Part of B-Cat practice is obviously a lot of flying. Jason took me up on one of these flights and we went through an intro low flying lesson. Jason did the vast majority of the flying, demoing everything from turn radius at different speeds, constant radius turns and reversal turns. There wasn't too much wind, but he pattered through the various illusions that we'd get by flying into a headwind [illusion of slow flight] and tailwind [illusion of fast flight]. Jason then finished off with some circuits and glide approaches; for some reason, Ardmore was not very busy for such a nice day.

Anyway, here are the pictures. These are all from the circuit session, including Ardmore itself, the Oceania Aviation helicopter hanger, the simple Grumman AA1C panel and, finally, the man himself [sorry dude!].