Back in the air

Back in the air again after our regulator failure, and having missed the fly-in to Himeville of 65 planes last Sunday, we did our own jaunt with our mate Louis in his Savannah to Himeville this Saturday. Himeville is an hour flight from Durban to the foothills of the Drakensberg Mountain range that divides South Africa from Lesotho. Even though it's at the foothills, check the vertical navigation map below.. it's still 6 500ft and without scaping our wheels on the top we flew to 7 000ft to get over the ridge then sink down 1 000ft to land on the grass runway. The weather was absolutely beautiful and warm, and nothing like the frosty freezing weather they had last week.

On the ground at Himeville airfield next to the village where we walked to for breakfast.

Of course we didn't fly in zigg-zaggs up but this is the printout I use from EasyPlan to gauge what heights you need to fly at to clear the terrain ahead. The route we followed was Virginia to Eston, Richmond then Himeville and we followed the same route back.



Llewellyn and I in the air

There was plenty of smoke from dry-grass winter fires and it seemed like an inversion with the smoke being trapped in a belt which thickened by the time we flew home with high temperatures of 32 deg c.

Armand, Louis and Llewellyn walk back to LPL and ZDL

It's quite breathtaking as you fly over the ridge and the ground suddenly drops away - we could descend comfortably from 7 000ft to 4 500ft for the route back to Richmond.

 

Airborne - first photos

Thanks Marc.. these are the first photos we have of the Red Rocket airborne.. taken on our jaunt to Himeville (see story below). The pics were taken just as we had crossed over the Bulwer mountains on the way back to Light Flight via Richmond after breakfast.

Blue sky, will fly!

It was a lovely Saturday morning, there were patches of cloud and some wind, but had an awesome flight to Himeville where we met up with the pilots of two other Light Flight planes for breakfast at Moorcroft Manor. Superb, and thanks to Mario for fetching us and returning us to our planes. Attempted a hectic cross-wind landing at Light Flight on the way home but aborted it and preferred my perfect landings at Homeville and Richmond and lastly home at Virginia. Not sure how much longer Virginia will be "home" for the Red Rocket as we are considering putting up our own hanger possibly at Light Flight.