Work and family has me pretty tied up at the moment so I have been doing enough to maintain currency.
September I had some flying in DFR our Astir for a total time of around 40mins. Difficult day which was making it hard to get away for any lenth of time. I did a couple of winch flights in VE the twin acro aswell during September, finishing of the month with a flight short flight in a K13.
In October I managed to get converted into the Discus. After I had a check ride with one of the instructors I got a full brief and was told to take an aerotow to 4000ft to get a feel for it, after 3 attempts at getting airbourne behind the tug (small amount of PIO) the rest of the tow to 4k was fine. The Discus is a big step up in performance in comparison to the Astir and at times it almost seems as it does not want to come down, it is also a lot sharper on handling, hence the PIO on the initial ground run. After floating around for half an hour of so I carried out a good circuit and managed to get the thing landed reasonably smoothly, the picture looks a lot different when rounding out in a discus as compared to the astir and a K13. I decided I needed another go at the aerotow so took a 2k launch. The ground run was much better this time out, requiring only one attempt at getting airbourne. I managed to find some lift over the town and stayed airbourne for nearly 40mins before coming in. The landing was ok, got a tad slow on round out which meant it was a little bumpy, but hey its a learning curve.
I am now approaching 30hrs - with Bronze C done and my XC navigation exercise to do once we have a motor glider back I am looking forward to setting off into the blue (well with some nicely popped Cu's) next season.
