Windy, quiet and no BFR flight

The past few days have been very windy. Yesterday we had wind gusts over 100Km/hr [60 miles/hr for those of you who haven't yet got with the rest of the world :-)]. Nothing unusual in that for Wellington, as it happens many times every year. It does make for interesting times in aviation though with flight delays, cancellations and hairy rides in and out of certain airports.

The other impact is that it pretty much closes down aero club operations... even lighter winds than what we have right now can serious hamper our operations. This is mainly to do with the fact that we have a lot of terrain around, so with strong winds, maybe big crosswinds [crosswinds were up around 30 knots at one stage earlier today], it's just too dangerous. Oh well. Better safe than sorry!

The only downside for me was that I was going to take my BFR [Biennial Flight Review] flight today. I need to do this every two years [yet another regulatory requirement], but if the weather is nice enough I'll do it Monday instead... otherwise, sometime next week.

Being a long weekend even the airline schedules have been significantly reduced. I did manage to get a few photos of this Air NZ/ Mount Cook Airline ATR72-600 [ATR72-212A on the CAA website], ZK-MVB. Hopefully I'll have more photos over the next couple of days!