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Blue
sky Sunday |
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30-Aug-15
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A blue
sky with some lift available was the last thing we expected
today after last night's heavy rain, a fairly ordinary
weather forecast and a very ordinary start to the day
weather wise.
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Peter
Stephenson (Duty Instructor) tried to muster up some
punters with an email from the airfield when there was
only me (Duty Pilot) and Tony Esler (Tug Pilot) as
definite starters.
The word had come through that our
only student pilot had to cancel due to illness ...
then Robert Hart called and confirmed that he was on
his way to YCAB for an annual check flight.
I put my
hand up for the hangar flight so we headed for RWY24
with GYK and more than a bit of hope that we may find
some wave (as the wind was fairly brisk from the
south-east).
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Peter
Stephenson and Robert Hart - in the background you can
see one of the few morning clouds (the shape of which had us thinking
there may some wave about).
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Peter
and Robert set off at 9:59 and were back 20 minutes
later from a 3,000 feet launch (despite the fact that
they had my blessing to stay up as long as they liked
should they find wave or any other decent lift).
Robert
did an excellent job of catering for our
request to land short so that we did not have to pack
up the van to do a
car retrieve.
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Tony Esler in SPA on late final to RWY24.
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Bernie
Gonsalves (Speedy) arrived at the flight line with
perfect timing to give us a hand to push GYK back for
the second (and last) launch of the day.
It took
him about 2.5 seconds to consider and accept my
invitation to be my guest in my search for flight of
the day honours (and maybe even some wave).
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Today's all
purpose van at the flight line on RWY24.
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Peter, Tony and Robert
all had things that they could and would like to do
this afternoon should gliding operations finish up
early so we suggested they head for
home after we were launched.
Tongue in cheek, we
indicated that we would probably be
away for a couple of hours and would have no problem
in putting the Blanik to bed and doing the paperwork
without them!
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Speedy at the controls in Yankee Kilo above the
hospital.
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We took a 3500 feet
launch at 10:32 am out over the Showground and were
very soon back over the Hospital (heading for a
downwind landing circuit at 1500 feet) when we
stumbled blindly onto what turned out to be some streets of lift in the blue.
That enabled us to
climb as we drifted downwind to the north-east in the
direction of Hazelton Airstrip, then descend
as we deliberately headed back upwind to the south-west
in the direction of the Morayfield shopping
centre ... only to
climb again and drift back the north-east ... you get the
picture!
We made it to 2700
feet several times which must have been where the
invisible inversion layer was today (as the only time
we were above 2700 feet was on tow).
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We were
back on deck after 61 minutes of having a lot of
fun!
The landing
on RWY24 ended with a very long ground roll to where I "parallel
parked"
GYK on the southern side of the runway adjacent to the RWY06 piano
keys ... in very convenient proximity to the tie-down
area as well as to where Peter had kindly left
transport for us in the form of Speedy's van.
It
was a bit disappointing however to see some cumulus
clouds start forming to the west of the airfield after we landed ... if only we could have
stayed up longer to make contact with and take
advantage of them!
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An
hour in Yankee Kilo, a steak and strawberry cheese cake - perhaps
just a tad too much for Speedy?
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Or was it just a quiet
moment of reflection after such pleasant thermaling in
the Blanik?
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Two
flights in GYK for a total of 81 minutes brought our August
gliding operations at Caboolture to a
close.
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Kevin
Rodda
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DUTY
PILOT
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PS:
Speedy claims however
that afterwards, he went shopping, then mowed the lawn, and
still did an hour or more of fabric repair work on the
work bench at home!
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