When I rocked up to the Darling Downs gliding club around 11am today I was whisked straight into the awaiting Puchacz training glider that had recently landed. My instructor Leon gave me a run through of the preflight checks and I suited up in my parachute.
I was talking with Fran this great pilot who had flown there from the Gold Coast to fly the tug for the day. It seemed like an ideal situation, her little plane was great and you can apparently buy them as a kit with most of it pre-cast, you just need to put the large bits together, which saves them time in the factory. It’s a little twin seater.
The first flight of the day was a chance for Leon to see where I was. I got the controls pretty quickly as he had given me some great pointers on incorporating the rudder. I find when people explain the reasoning behind something like that I get it much quicker.
— The problem is the nose wants to yaw up and away from the turn and you need to correct this with rudder. So when you pull the stick to the left, the right wing goes up and the drag is higher on this wing, so it is pulled back. Applying left rudder counteracts this. Power pilots apparently don’t understand this concept very well, so I am happy to have this skill down now. —
We did lots of turns and the day was littered with excellent lift.. Several times we thought about coming down, and looked for where we should be to join the circuit.. and beep beep beep, the variometer lets us know we are getting good lift, often up over seven knots.
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On my last flight of the day I ended up doing a lot of thermalling by myself and he seemed pretty happy as I managed to get the plane from 3000 feet above ground to around 4500.. Which was the biggest buzz. In the end after battling to find lift for the past half hour, when it came time to come home it became impossible,, so Leon ended up doing some impressive steep turns to wash off some altitude.
Ideally would have loved to get in a third flight but I’m happy we got some at all. I look forward to going back in the new year.