Windrushers junior member Charles Jessop recently got a visit in New Zealand (he's there on a gap year, lucky boy, not that I'm jealous...) from his father Paul, who was taking time off from a round-the-world business trip.The weather wasn’t brilliant but they flew a couple of days with Charles as pilot in command, exercising the privileges of his NZ Qualified Glider Pilot status.
Inevitably, with dodgy advice coming from the back seat, they landed out on a back-country strip but an airborne radio relay scrambled a tow plane with Omarama’s chief tuggie at the controls. That arrived just as the duo (who claim they landed out because they weren’t flying a Duo but rather a Twin Astir) had pushed their mount to the (slightly) uphill end of the strip. The tuggie decided he preferred the other direction and used the Pawnee to tow them to the far end of the strip, where after much sucking of teeth and throwing of grass into the air, decided the earlier assessment was right and towed them back. An old tyre substituted for a wing runner and once airborne they had another few hours of cross country soaring (without landing out again).
They didn't have gap years when I was young. Honest, I'm not jealous about him flying in NZ. Not one bit... Honest, sob sob.
No comments:
Post a Comment