David's Flight Adventures

Well today was a turn up for the books.  30 degrees and almost clear blue skies.  A perfect day for a flying lesson. I arrived at the airfield nice and early only to find that Martin, my instructor, was up on a reintroduction to flying flight and that the people had arrived late due to bad traffic.  This was not a problem for me as I was in no hurry so I put the kettle on and had a coffee.  I had a long chat with the lady who was waiting for her husband who was on the flight and discovered that he had previously held a licence, but had let it lapse due to health reasons.  Before this lapse, he had flown gliders out of Nympsfield, near where I live, and he had also had lessons in the C42 out of Staverton, where I had looked in to learning from.  It was a very pleasant way to spend half an hour waiting. Then it was my turn.  Today we were going to look at Exercise 7, Basic Climbing and Descending. Climbing There are 2 types of climb, Best Rate of...

The lessons will now follow the Microlight Briefing Notes book.  I have competed lesson 1, the Air Experience Flight, and lesson 4, Effects of Controls.  We still need to go back and formally do lesson 2 and 3, which are: 2: Aircraft Familiarisation 3: Preparation For Flight and Action After. In reality, I am OK with 2 as I have a reasonable knowledge of the constituent parts of the aircraft and their functions.  As for 3, we booked at fueling the aircraft last time and this time, the first thing I was asked to do was add 10 litres of fuel to the aircraft. This is a very manual task involving taking a 25 litre jerry can out to the aircraft and manually pumping the MOGAS (motor gasoline) in to the tank with a hand pump.  You can then see how much fuel you have by looking at the fuel tank in the aircraft through a hole in the cockpit.  It is not easy to see, but I am sure it will get more familiar as time goes on. Once strapped in, we ran through the sta...