Newcastle Hang Gliding Club

Thursday 25-02-2010 another tough day on the coast.

After launching from Strezzie and floating around for an hour or so I decided to land at Dixon Park. I heard that there was strong roof suck at Empire Park so thought it best to give it a wide berth ;-)

In the 16Kn ESE landing ontop at Dicko was a breeze.

The conditions seemed to get better and better and after a couple more flights and watching Conrad put my fun through its paces, it was time to wind down with some mates at the pub.

Judging from the Manilla results, I'd guess that there are a number of pilots in the club who've flown qalifying flights for FAI Badges recently.

I've been working with the HGFA to get the FAI Badge applicatoin form updated. This is still a work in progress, but hopefully, we're very nearly done.

If anyone wants help with downloading their flight from their GPS, or with logging it on an Online Competition, bring your GPS along to the meeting this week, and I'll see if I can help you out. If your GPS came with cables for connecting it to a computer, then bring those as well.

Dawson

We got 5 days flying out of 7 and each day was a bit better. Newcastle pilots did well including Conrad who came second in the open class and Dustan who one "Best of The Rest" and Rob Larkin and Allan McMillan who came first and second in the floater class.

Everyone got high and flew far and we only did the Borah shuffle once.

Two days in a row!!! tooo good to be true!!

After watching Kieran Black give his fun a workout above the restaurant I was keen for a fly myself.

At strezzie launch Gary P was eyeing out the conditions as well. It was blowing 18 to 23 Kn from the SE and I thought it wiser to go to Dixon Park. Gary needed a pit stop and decided Dixon Park was as good a place as any, off we went.

It wasn't quite a dawn expedition but the morning air was brilliant. The light was good and the whole thing was worthy of recording.

So Here t'is

http://vimeo.com/9545533

At the briefing Allan(the Weatherman) delighted all the pilots with a forecast of good weather for the rest of the week. The northerly winds, heat and rain have gone away and it is very pleasant in Manilla.

Saturday was the practice day and there was a strong northerly wind blowing. A exact copy of the day before apparently. A small group of hangies set up on the NE launch and each managed to get off when the thermals dragged the wind around enough.

Whe I woke up, the BOM's radar showed heavy raid right over launch and up to Newcastle. The rain was moving inland. Seabreeze was showing 8 knots from the south. It had been consistently over 15 knots SSE all night until the last half hour or so. There were no other storms around, so I figured that the drop in wind was just a temporary thing associated with the shower that was moving through, and shuld have passed by the time I got to launch. Sure enough, I got to launch, having driven through some very heavy rain near Speers Point to find that the rain had passed.

For those of us fortunate enough to get away for some play, what a day!!!

Here is a bit of footage from the air and some landings I caught on camera

Link

Cheers

Adriaan

This is the forecast for Max Altitude achievable at 13:00 with arrows showing the winds