A Pilatus amongst the Cu's

At my previous visit to the club I was given the all clear to advance into a single seater, the first step for pilots at GCWA out of a two seat trainer is our old Pilatus B4-PC11.  I was looking forward to giving this a go this weekend and starting to challenge myself with better thermalling as I prepare myself for heading out cross country after winter.  Read on for more...

Steadily advancing; and a lesson learned

Well, after making steady progress since going solo I had to take and enforced break from flying for the past six weeks.  Due to work commitments I've been spending a lot of time shuttling back and forth between WA and QLD, and also managed to squeeze in a week's holiday in Melbourne with my lovely wife to treat her for her birthday :)  So, most of my flying for the past couple of months has been from the comfort of a window seat of an A340 heading across the country.  Despite having only returned from my latest trip over to Mackay at midnight on Friday, I was determined to get out to the club today and get some practice in.  Read more after the break...

Some more video

G'day all,

As promised, here's some footage taken from my most recent flight.  I managed to stay up for over an hour in fairly difficult conditions, which I'm happy with.  Launch was good, but I'm not as happy with the landing, which saw me let the nosewheel down to the runway a bit too early.

Enjoy!

Cheers,
Derek

Onwards and Upwards. Well, onwards anyway...

Dragging myself out of bed this morning, getting out to Cunderdin was a 50/50 prospect at best.  After a day spent celebrating my father-in-law's birthday with maybe one too many bottles of wine and certainly way too much to eat, I was certainly feeling sluggish.  However, I wanted to play around with my action cam and get some footage, and probably won't have an opportunity to get out to the club again for a few weeks so I downed a coffee and packed my supplies, then psyched myself up for the drive.  I'm glad I did, as I had a most enjoyable day.  Read on for more...

Flyin' Solo

This morning I headed up to the club nice and early, away from home at 6am with a 2 hour drive out to Cunderdin.  I was rostered on to fill in for another member as the day's logkeeper, a duty I really need to take on a bit more often as I've just filled the committee position of Club Logkeeper and will be responsible for making sure all of the club's logs are kept accurate and up to date for the GFA.  I also hoped that I'd be able to secure a couple of flights to extend on my last trip where I managed to finally go solo.  It turned out to be a fairly busy day, and I certainly got my opportunity.  Read on for more, including my first flying video!