Sunday, August 10, 2008

Circuits today

I was supposed to go for a flight yesterday, but with the weather being rubbish and the aircraft in maintenance, that was a no-go.

Today my preferred aircraft was still in maintenance, but there was another Piper PA28-181 Archer available, so I took that up for a few circuits. ZK-FHQ is a recently repainted aircraft that I briefly profiled here. The aircraft is good to fly [I think I had 1000 feet/min climb at about 85 knots, 2 POB], and I managed 4 circuits in 0.6 hrs - rather good for Wellington's fairly busy class-C airspace. No pictures, but we had very light winds [2 knots reported for the surface wind], almost a clear sky, 50Km visibility and snow on the hills after the cold weather of the past few days.

Awesome!

2 comments:

Flyinkiwi said...

I managed to get up in the air yesterday too for an hour. I was getting similar climb performance as you, but I was in a 172M. I finally found an 80 knot climb attitude and the VSI was showing about 1400 fpm.

Rodney said...

Awesome, eh?

It was an good day for a fly. I had a headwind [around 2 knots] on takeoff, and a few knots tailwind all the way down finals [go figure that out]. The joys of having water at both ends of the runway I guess :-)