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I have never flown on a day where I landed with a dripping airplane. This was a first. It’s not like it was raining as we were flying, but misty drizzle might adequately describe it; I had to wipe the mist off of Brady’s glasses. Martin guessed cloud deck at 1000ft and it was lower than that at times. Tom and Martin took turns off the winch set up the short way across the field. The wind was from almost due North and quite cutting. Both guys commented they had some miserable flights, but it looked like they had fun! Brady and Martin flew hand-launch a bit between drizzles.

Brady flew the powered SBXC while my school colleague, Joe, flew the ground control station. We were able to climb out with relative authority using a Neu 1115/2Y/3.7 and 18x13 prop. Brady actually started finding some thermals while we were spinning up the autopilot configuration stuff. We transitioned over to autopilot for the first time on this plane and watched what Joe called “the ocean wave” as pitch slowly oscillated around a bit. I believe Brady’s description was “waggly.” Joe and I asked Brady to take over after a minute and half of this, made a few tuning adjustments, then back on autopilot much more successfully this time. We flew 18 minutes on AP, gradually reducing the altitude to duck the clouds. We started at 1000ft and ended up stepping down at 700ft and even that was rather wispy at times. On the computer, we were looking at an instantaneous watt-meter so we could tell the power consumption for different airspeeds. With the turbulence and the drizzle, the numbers weren’t of terrible much use, but now we have the process and know that it works. After all of the testing my numb fingers could stand (don’t know how Brady flew), we came in for an aborted landing approach to evaluate climb-out performance and got about 600 ft/min after a half-hour of flying around. Then Brady did a final approach and landed clean as could be done. We all came to a consensus that it was just not good to keep pushing in the weather, so we packed it all back up and headed home for warmth and a nap (I did at least).

I must note that both Brady and Martin were hooking thermals with DLG’s after I stopped to watch. Pretty amazing for a day like today! I wasn’t watching Tom fly, but I’m sure he was having intermittent luck too :-)

Thanks especially to Joe and Brady for flying in incredibly nasty weather and props to Tom and Martin for braving the elements! Perhaps next time we’ll have some better conditions for XC...