13,000 feet up and all is well!

Weather wise, it has been a fantastic couple of days here in Wellington! Although cold, there has been very little wind, no cloud and combined with a long weekend, is making for perfect flying conditions.

Yesterday I took the Club's Cessna 172N, ZK-FLT, up for 1.5 hours. Another Club pilot [Hello Amy!] came for a ride and we headed out over the east coast of the lower North Island for a good look around. To get the best look around, we headed up to 13,000 feet [about 4 kms straight up], the highest we can fly without oxygen. The visibility was so good that we could see Mt Ruapehu to the north and had great views of the South Island [at least the northern parts] to the west and south. Fantastic!

ZK-FLT is only a 160hp model, so with fuel, 2 people and a couple of small bags it was struggling up at 200-300 feet/ minute at the end, but it was well worth it!

We came back overhead Martinborough and Featherston then down the Hutt Valley to Wellington.

I'm waiting for a few photos from the flight to arrive - I'll post these when they appear. Meanwhile, here's our aircraft for the day and a brief screen-grab from my phone on the way up [yeah, I forgot to get another one while up there - Amy got a photo of the altimeter, so I'll post that laters]. It's GPS-derived data - even so the altitude only about 100-200 feet out at any time and the speed is ground speed