My first night flight..

After talking about it for five years or so I’ve finally started my night rating. I don’t know if I’ll get it done by the time summer arrives but at least I’m having a bit of a go at it, and it’s something different!

Several of us turned up last night for a mass briefing, then one by one flew with an instructor on our first night flights. One person opted for a 172, the others and myself decided we’d take an Archer. Problem was, the landing light on the Archer was unserviceable, so when it came time for me to go – 8:30PM last night, we took the 172.

I have only been flying at night on Flight Sim, so it was a huge shock for me to get up over the city and find that, yep, it looks exactly like it does on Flight Sim!! A web of yellowy dots and that’s a city!! Fantastic!!!! The whole experience is different, from flying with panel lights to seeing your landing light in the sky in front of you.. Awesome experience!

Now some details:

The whole thing of taxiing at night takes some getting used to, especially as we don’t have a sealed taxiway on our side of the airport. So we taxi through the grass hoping to avoid bogging down. Then we line up and go, and it’s straight onto the instruments. In my case the turn coordinator is not working in that plane, so it’s onto the AH and away we go.. I didn’t have too many issues last night as I’m happy flying on instruments, and there was a little horizon we could see so no worries. For the first 15 mins or so we flew over town, I flew over what I thought was my house, and then we went out and did some exercises, including steep turns while looking at the blackness, and found I pulled back way too hard! Have to work on that next time.

We then went back and did some circuits, and I found I was way high on base leg then after going down fast, we were too low on finals. Also something to work on. My landings weren’t too bad, considering it was might first night flight, and I didn’t break the plane!!

On my second circuit, as we were climbing out, the artificial horizon started a slight bank on it’s own for a few seconds and then, WHAM, just fell over to about 60 degrees angle of bank and sat there. My instructor saw it at the same time as I did and pointed out we’d just lost our AH. Bearing in mind the turn coordinator was also not operational, and we were climbing out at 9PM at night, pointing away from the lights of town, with no turn coordinator and no AH. Yay!
We were able to pick out enough horizon to allow us to continue, and I flew the rest of the circuit and landed, unfortunately having to cut the lesson short, but it was fun all right!!!
It then occurred to me that they talked at length about having a torch and to use it immediately if you have lights or electrical failure, but there was no mention of what to do if the instruments aren’t worth looking at!!

Anyway, a good fun lesson, a bit of drama, and I hope they fix both planes soon!!!

A fantastic aviation short film

I heard about this in one of the many podcasts I subscribe to.. It's a 10 minute short film about breaking the sound barrier, and it's damn fantastic. Just bear in mind when you watch this that 1) it's made in Ireland. 2) you tell me which bits are CGI, and 3) ALL the CGI shots were designed and rendered by the one bloke who made the movie. And he did it out of his own pocket as well, no government grants here!

Have a look here and see for yourself...

Some rules to remember

I was listening to this week's episode of The Finer Points, an excellent flying podcast, and I thought it was worth sharing what he said.

His first rule was regarding deciding what altitude to fly a trip at, and he reckons you should use a maximum of 1000 feet of altitude for every ten minutes of flight. So for my usual trip to Tauranga of 25 mins, we're looking at 2500ft. Whakatane at 50 mins would be 5000 ft. This all sounds logical and commonsense to me..

His second rule is more a rule of thumb, I guess. This is something that I've forgotten, that's if I ever knew this. He says True Airspeed increases over IAS by 2% every 1000 ft. We were doing 125kt indicated in the Arrow the other day at 5500ft and the GPS and DME both read 137, which is bang on, at least according to my feeble maths skills..

Some videos you might enjoy...

Yeah, I know the first couple of videos aren't flying related, but they're that awesome I just had to share them...


1158HP Skyline on a dyno - just listen to the sound - OMG!!


The tunnel of death - a good reason not to drive in Russia!!!


And a couple of flying videos to keep you all happy...


A very very close call in a Yak 3


First time in a jet...

Hawkes Bay for the day..

At the AGM on Tuesday, Aaron asked me if I wanted to come with him on a trip to the Hawke's Bay on Thursday in DQV. I was dubious because it didn't give me much time to arrange time off work, but I asked my boss who very kindly gave me the day off. Thursday rolled round and the weather didn't look too bad, so off we went. I was a bit dismayed that Aaron wanted to go at 7:45am, not being an early riser and all that, but since there's not many hours of daylight this time of year I agreed..

We got the aircraft out and got going, and we realised that although the day was quite dismal, the high cloud was much higher than it looked, and as we climbed up we easily made it to 6000 feet, and trucked along nicely, all the way to Napier. To my delight the horizon was lit up with a fantastic sunrise. My only bummer was my GPS wouldn't acquire any satellites, so I made a note to drop it in to Ham Avionics when I got back.

Our trip to Hastings was so smooth it was almost scary - much smoother than any flight I can remember for a long long time. I've only been to Napier once and it was ugly weather, this time we were nice and high, and I got some nice pics on the way. We descended and arrived at Hastings, and Aaron did an excellent landing. We parked up and our ride arrived, and off we went into town. At this point Aaron had work to do, and I wanted to have a look around town, so I grabbed my camera and headed off.

Aaron suggested I might want to go for a fly, and after a couple of hours mucking round town I was ready to go flying, so I shot off back to the airport, and had a look at the chart and VFG to get myself familiar with the area. As per Aaron's suggestion, I took off out of Hastings and headed east. Using the DME to ensure I remained clear of Napier airspace, I flew round Te Mata, then out to Cape Kidnappers which I flew round at 2200 feet to stay above the 2000ft high restricted area. I then requested and was granted clearance into Napier airspace. I flew over Napier city and did a couple of orbits, then did a touch and go at Napier airport before heading back to Hastings, did an overhead join and landed. Wind was calm so I picked the runway that would allow me to roll out and not have to brake hard or backtrack to taxi off, and after the best damn landing I think I've ever done, which of course no bastard was watching, I taxied back and parked up. A wonderful little experience, and I now have much more of an idea about the geography of the area. I also am much more relaxed about flying around there now I have the lay of the land. Shortly afterwards, Aaron txted me and asked how much fuel was in the aircraft, and after checking, I thought 90 litres was cutting it a bit fine, so I went and filled it up, and as I was doing that Aaron arrived.

Shortly after 3pm we took off, and headed back to Hamilton. This was another wonderful smooth, fast flight, the aircraft went beautifully, but I wish the heater didn't just cook your feet - as copilot I was in charge of the heater and spent the flight adjusting it to and fro, as we'd go from cook to freeze and back again.. When we arrived at Hamilton we were told to hold at Mystery Creek as there were 5 in the circuit, and I counted six orbits by the time we got clearance to descend and join. Shortly afterwards we were all instructed to land and get clear as there was an ATR in trouble on approach. We parked the plane and ran back to the runway with probably everyone else on the airfield, only to watch the aircraft in question land normally. The paper today mentioned something about hydraulic problems, but it looked fine to me!!

I ran over to Ham Aero with my GPS, and managed to catch them before they went home. They had a look at it and pronounced it had probably lost it's almanac due to not being used for a few weeks, and I remembered the batteries had been flat after using it last time. I didn't realise they can lose their almanac but now I do, and if this happens, I know all I have to do is choose New Location->Automatic, and leave it by the window for half an hour and it will pick up the local satellites. Much relief was to be had when it started working again!!!

Thanks to Aaron and my manager at work who let me take time off at such short notice, I had an absolutely fantastic day. I was just thrilled how it worked out, and I managed to take lots of photos and videos, my favourites are all on a flickr set. A couple of the good ones are here, but by all means go and check out the set. Most of these photos and videos were shot using a Canon A570 IS


Sunrise over a sea of fog, somewhere near Taupo I think


Some snowy looking mountains - no idea what they're called, sorry


160kt IAS - yeah!!


Taupo Racetrack


Napier city


Taking off at Hamilton


Landing at Hastings


Landing at Hamilton


Flying round Te Mata peak - at least I think it was Te Mata, I kinda just headed east for the rockiest looking hill I could find :-)

Tom Cruise's P-51

I didn't know Tom Cruise owns a P-51, but here is a photo of it. Whatever I might think of him, anyone who flies a Mustang can't be all that bad, right?? :-)

Mac vs PC with a twist.

Yeah, I know, I am one of those odd types who uses a Mac. The rest of the world thinks we're a bit funny in the head, I think, but I sure love my Mac. And I love to see when the Mac kicks the PC's ass.

Only, in this article, it's a 1986 Mac Plus versus a 2007 Windows XP box. You'll never guess who wins!!

Makes me want a classic Mac so badly right now it's not funny :-)