| Flying |
|
|
| 10:53am 22/09/2008 |
| |
Managed to get some gliding in on the weekend. A two hour flight in interesting conditions. Strong north westerly wind with a mix of thermal and wave lift. The HP14 handled the strong cross wind okay on launch and landing.
A few dangerous incidents occurred.
A Super Arrow flew across the strip at low altitude and almost hit a tug and glider combination as it was launching. He ended up out outlanding in a field beside the airfield. I don't know what he was thinking, a modified right hand circuit onto the active strip or a modified circuit onto the cross strip would have been safer.
A tug pilot taxied across the strip in front of landing aircraft.
A Janus B had a heavy landing, bouncing multiple times and pushing the nose wheel up through the fuselage. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| Book Meme |
|
|
| 11:09am 05/08/2008 |
| |
awksome posted this. I fail. I've only read seven on this list. my excuse is I mainly read science fiction and there isn't much on this list.
The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Prince Caspian - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (!!!)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (!!!!!)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (!!!)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (Italicized for a pathetic attempt.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo |
|
| |
|
Read 4 - Post |
| |
| HP-14 glider back in service |
|
|
| 11:06am 30/05/2008 |
| |
I did the post form 2 inspection evaluation flight on my Schreder HP-14V glider last weekend. I had to run it up to near the redline and do a stall etc just to check it was all working properly. It didn't fall apart, which is a good thing. I'm hoping to do a bit of pleasant late autumn local soaring this weekend.
http://www.soaridaho.com/Schreder/ |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| Glider is back |
|
|
| 11:21am 19/05/2008 |
| |
My HP-14V is back from it's annual inspection and is legal to fly again. It's tucked away in a club hangar spot that I have leased for 12 months. A pity the weather is bad now. We need the rain, but it's no good for soaring. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| |
|
|
| 02:28pm 25/04/2008 |
| |
Still waiting for my glider to come back from the glider inspecting chappy. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| Grounded. |
|
|
| 04:16pm 04/03/2008 |
| |
My glider is grounded, awaiting it's annual inspection, which has had to be put off until the 29th March.
I went for one last flight in it last Saturday. Over two hours of local soaring. I didn't think conditions were quite good enough to go cross country.
A couple of the local heroes thought they would give it a go anyway. I ended up have to retrieve Olgy and the club LS4 from near Ballarat. Another late night when I had so wanted to get home from the airfield a bit early for a change.
Fortunately Rolf just made it back in his PIK 20B. He was on the radio saying he might have to land at Fiskeville because he didn't quite have final glide.
The best of the season is over now, I'm slightly disappointed that I only managed to make two decent length cross country flights. |
|
| |
|
Read 1 - Post |
| |
| 300km Flight |
|
|
| 07:28pm 28/01/2008 |
| |
Finally managed to get away from the airfield again for a bit of a cross country glider flight in my HP14.
Online Contest flight information:
http://www3.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?flightId=-1238800356
It was a pretty strong day but pushing into a 20 knot wind slowed me down a lot. It started raining on me near Ararat A/D so I decided to turn from home, fearing general over development. The rain never became widespread and I could have extended the flight, but better safe than sorry. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| Scratching Around |
|
|
| 09:39am 16/01/2008 |
| |
Only gliding news to report. Had a lot of flights recently but none of significant distance. I outlanded near Ballan trying to do a 500km flight. Ballan is only about 20km from the airfield. Ha Ha.
One flight I spent 3 hours flying around near the airfield unable to get above 2800ft on a 38C day, due to a strong temperature inversion. Very uncomfortable and pretty pointless. If it had got a little hotter the inversion would have broken.
I'm really hoping for a decent cross country distance flight before I go back to work next week. |
|
| |
|
Read 1 - Post |
| |
| |
|
|
| 04:29pm 20/11/2007 |
| |
Hmmm no post for 7 weeks. :(
Tried to do some gliding the other week, heavy rain on 2 out of 4 days I wanted to fly. What happened to the drought? I got in a 3 hour plus flight but couldn't go anywhere because the thermals were topping out at 3500 foot.
Glider is back in the trailer again, I'm going to do some more work on the trailer and fittings to make rigging easier. New wheels for the wing jigs and fuselage dolly etc. Still waiting on my father-in-law to finalise the design of the one person rigging wing dolly so I can finish it.
I bought a bucket load of US import PS2 games. Currently playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. as well as Tales of Legendia. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| Glider in trailer |
|
|
| 03:20pm 01/10/2007 |
| |
I've had to de-rig the HP-14 and put it in the trailer. :( The club hangar spot I was occupying is required by a club glider again.
My FLARM anti-collision device is playing up, seems like it's transmit/receive range is too short for some reason. The antenna seems okay, and I tried a different one with similar results. HMMMM.
I'm rostered on to help with the annual inspection on the the club AS K-13 glider for the next few weekends, so no more gliding for a while anyway. :( |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| 167km flight in HP14 VH-GGB |
|
|
| 12:41pm 11/09/2007 |
| |
http://www3.onlinecontest.org/olc-2.0/gliding/flightinfo.html?flightId=-419168605
There is a link on that page to get a google earth kml file of the flight.
Got a bit low a few times. It wasn't a relaxing flight but I got a good workout. The final glide was a bit interesting The wind calculation from my last thermal was a slight westerly tail wind for the homebound leg, but lower down and closer to the airfield it an easterly head wind, increasing in strength. Arrived back with only enough height to do a modified circuit into runway 01. Gliders were still launching with a tail wind off 27 so a straight in approach on 09 wasn't a good idea. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| A Longer Flight |
|
|
| 10:56am 21/08/2007 |
| |
I went for a bit of a flight in VH-GGB my HP-14 glider. 2 hours 28 minutes, not bad considering it isn't officially spring here yet. Quite weak lift, most thermals were less than 1 knot average. I hit one that was 2.7 knot by following an eagle! A lot of flying in circles going nowhere. I need to alter my parachute/cushions/seating position because I was getting very uncomfortable by the end of the flight. "GeeBee" as the glider is now nicknamed, is pretty tiring to fly, heavy controls and slow roll. I got a good workout, but I proved it can stay up on weak days. Glides okay too, ran it up to 70+ knots for a while and the glide angle stayed quite reasonable. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| weekend gliding |
|
|
| 06:46pm 24/07/2007 |
| |
Not great soaring conditions but at least no rain (or snow). Got the HP-14 rigged and was able to leave it in a club hangar spot so it will be ready to go next weekend as well. I finally managed a somewhat nicer landing in the HP-14.
Paul Bikle's HP-14T with 17.3m span got a measured 36.3:1 L/D ratio. My flight logs from the weekend (fairly still air) seem to show my HP-14V is getting a bit over 35:1. Not bad considering I didn't tape it up and it is only the standard HP-14 16.7m span. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| Gliding Chores |
|
|
| 02:13pm 09/07/2007 |
| |
It has been too wet to do any gliding recently.
I didn't manage to install the replacement vario in the Jantar, JB decided we need to fit the FLARM into the panel while we were about it, so I got to learn all the ins an outs of bending sheet metal, dimpling rivets etc.
JB also worked out how to extract the medical oxygen bottle fiting from my regulator without damaging it so I can fit the regular 540 fitting.
Anime currently watching: Divergence Eve
hmmm, a strangely hard science SF story about watchers, who are tasked with stopping nasty inter-dimesional creatures from intruding into our own universe. The female pilots all have large strangely shaped breasts that are constantly giggling in physics defying ways. Being your average lecherous male, I'm not adverse to this kind of thing, but this is a bit over the top. It detracts from what so far seems to be a serious, well told story. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| DG300 |
|
|
| 01:05pm 18/06/2007 |
| |
First flight in the club DG300. Had a very short flight, cloud base was around 2000 MSL. I thumped it in pretty hard on the landing, right in front of everyone, oh the shame. No damage done except to my pride. |
|
| |
|
Post |
| |
| Queens Birthday Holiday |
|
|
| 10:33am 12/06/2007 |
| |
I didn't fly over the holiday weekend.
I went to the airfield and did a few more maintenance chores on the glider and trailer. I installed a new oxygen bottle in the HP14 and worked on mounting a new headrest which shares some of the oxygen bottle mounting hardware. The previous owner just tied a moldy old pillow to the oxygen bottle as a headrest!
Helen installed some hooks to hold the wing root clamps out of the way while getting the wings in and out of the trailer.
We installed some planks on the inside of the trailer rear door to stop people putting their feet through the aluminum cladding.
I just finished drawing up some plans of the wing dolly, we can take parts to the welder tomorrow.
We started watching another anime series with Mike, Shingu Secret of the Stellar Wars. Which is directed by Tatsuo Sato, who directed Nadesico and Stellvia. So far it has been very enjoyable. |
|
| |
|
Read 2 - Post |
| |
| Gliding |
|
|
| 01:31pm 03/06/2007 |
| |
Ha, finally got a decent flight in, though I resorted to using the club Jantar Standard 2 because I was too lazy to rig my HP14. 1 hour 43 minute duration. I visited Pykes Creek Reservoir dam wall and the Fiskville Country Fire Authority airstrip. Not bad going for this time of year, winter is definitely here, with snow falling in the alpine areas. Drat, I didn't win the daily competition for the longest duration or longest cross country flight. No one else managed a valid duration flight (has to be longer than 4 times your aerotow time) so it was a no-contest :(. |
|
| |
|
Read 1 - Post |
| |
|
|
|