Meteors, Parties and Fires

After a day of shopping malls, seafood risotto and gnocchi and a 6km walk, I figured I had done enough for a mallowpuff and was thinking about some night flying. Jade asked why? Because I can... duh!

Anyway, as I was staring at the twilight sky debating whether or not the weather was going to be suitable, Trevor sent me a text message asking if I was keen for some night cross country action...

We headed out to the club, pre-flighted JBL and gassed her up and then Trevor did 3 circuits for his night currency (before curfew kicked in) and then I jumped in. He told me the weather looked a bit suspect for a cross-country. After we got airbourne, I could see that the cloud build-up looked pretty bad in pretty much every direction except out over the Tasman Sea. While I am sure I would have enjoyed a 15 hour flight across the Tasman, the lack of long range tanks on the 152 and the fact we had no life-jackets on board made the idea a bit of a non-starter ;)

We decided for a quick jolly over the city instead and our assumption about the weather seemed to have been confirmed when the clouds to the south were light up by what we thought was lightening... I heard on the radio this morning that it was actually part of a meteor shower! Either way, it was an impressive, and somewhat un-nerving sight.

We headed out towards the city, and overflew the domain and saw the remnants of the 'Christmas in the Park' show... Heading over towards Ponsonby we saw some flashing lights and long queues of traffic at what we initially thought was a police breathtesting checkpoint. Turned out to be a huge fire in a laundry. A little disconcerting as we smelled the smoke from 1500' and Trevor said "I hope that is not us!"

We hooked around the SkyTower looking very 'Christmassy' in its green and red lights and then we decided to call it a night and headed back to Ardmore.


This flight: 0.6 PinC Night
Total Hours: 167.4 (78.9/67.5 Day, 8.6/12.4 Night, 7.0 IFR)