With a moderate Easterly breeze and blue skies the thermals got going quite early.
In fact during my weather check flight I had to curtail the climb in a 5 knot thermal so that I could start instructing, didn’t feel quite right pulling the brakes in such good lift 🙁
As the day went on the lift became more consistent and extended flights and good climbs were the order of the day. During one such flight with Jeremy in the Puchacz we contacted a thermal at around 900ft and climbed at between 5 and 8 knots to 3500ft. The thermal was quite rough which made Jeremy work hard at keeping centred.
After about 40 mins of flying all that coffee I had drunk earlier needed to come out and with Jeremy saying he wanted a P2 (been wanting to say that for ages!) we got down quite quickly.
One feature of the Easterly breeze was that the conditions were ideal to practise landing between the caravan and main gate as the photo of Carol and Mark in JPC below shows.
Earlier, whilst putting Chris B through his BI checks, we came directly in across the airfield from just in front of the caravan, the headwind graphically showing that ground speed is reduced as we came to a halt only one or two hundred yards or so into the airfield. All in all an approach that I haven’t had a chance to do until now but one that Chris handled very well so was signed off for another year.
Not sure who had the longest flight but I think Colin, Pete and Chris all managed to stay up for around 1.5 hours each.
Phil
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