bouncing down the runway

There is more and more people showing up at the airport every weekend. Somebody must have told them that Ziggy is performing powered flying attempts. We will call it powered flying a bit later ;-)

flying Sunday

We got lucky yesterday and had some x-wind so that I could finish my RAA conversion. I went up with Peter for a few patterns and the bloody engine kept "quitting" in any possible configuration. This just has to be Pete's favorite since he's laughing out loud every time he pulls the throttle. He did something that would normally scare the shit out of me if I was flying in my home club in Szczecin. He pulled throttle right after TO approx. 100 ft off the ground. It's a piece of cake in Horsham though. You can always just land straight ahead on a paddock that is twice the airport size. This is the advantage of not having an airport in the middle of a big congested city.

figuring out where to go

The plan was to find some x-wind somewhere and since there are quite a few strips within 50 km radius this was not a problem. We ended up never leaving YHSM though. There was just enough x-wind for the required excercises.

24-5109 cockpit

I'm done with my training. I finished up with a written test on Human Factor yesterday afternoon. I didn't have any time at all for preparation and just went for it. It turned out not to be too hard and I ended up with 17 right answers out of 20. Good enough. All there is left to do is to send out my paperwork and I'll be waiting for my RAA licence.

If you have ever wondered how many men it takes to program a remote control for the airport gate ... here it is. Phil organized the control for us and all there was left was programing it. Men just don't RTFD (Read The F...ing Directions) and started figuring it out themselves having the directions in their hands. Check out the pics:

"oh, this is just directions ... we'll do better without..."

And then there were more of them ...

"oh well ... maybe we'll just have a quick look on the manual"

Finally they succeeded after "wasting" one whole minute on reading the chapter "How to program your remote". I would have thought reading that would be a good start and would probably save them some time and take just one of them. All right, maybe two: one who can read and the other one to understand and perform the activities required. 

Please don't take the above description too seriously guys. You are all great anyways ;-)

And then it was Ziggy's turn ... again. Him and Peter kept going up and down for an hour or so.

Zig explaining Pete the newest yet unknown landing techniques

All in all it was a nice and successful weekend. Ziggy is not 100% happy with his success though trying to find explanation for the bouncing Jabiru. As they say BTDT (Been There Done That). One day you'll figure it out Zig!