New Year Circle

Happy New Year!

I had planned to go to the New Year's Day fly-in at Newnham yesterday but the visibility was grim; I couldn't see the trees on Hinton Hill which made it well short of the necessary 3000 metres. Today was very different though, a bit hazy but over 10 kms visibility with broken cloud. But there was no fly-in so I thought I'd fly a task, a circle, and plot my track with my GPS. I picked a small circle at random from my acetates and stuck it on my chart with Banbury and Shoteswell inside the circle.

For no reason in particular I decided to fly anti-clockwise, starting in the top right at Boddington Reservoir. The wind was from the southeast and reasonably brisk so the downwind arc was pretty fast and the upwind very slow indeed. Just how slow I thought I'd find out from my GPS track. Visibility from the Sluka is about as good as it gets in a fixed wing microlight. The instrument panel shows the hands-off cruise settings at 5000 RPM.

It was a fine flight but I was disappointed to find that I'd foolishly forgottento switch my GPS to track recording mode. Still, tomorrow looks pretty good, cold but much brighter, so I'll probably fly the same circle but clockwise this time.