Monday, 24 March 2008

Making hay while the sun shines

So I am wandering around shopping malls looking at handbags and shoes (curse you Easter Saturday!) wishing Trevor had not gone to Rock2Wellington so we could have gone flying, when I get a phone call from the CFI wanting to know if I wanted to do a cross country flight as they had spare aircraft, a spare instructor and B.E.A. ootiful weather...

I thought about it for a 0.0000000002 seconds and said yes ;)

I headed out to NZAR after arranging some lunch for jade so she would not die of hunger and met the new C-Cat instructor Matt. We went over the flight planning, weather, NOTAMs and covered what to expect in terms of radio calls and approach/departure procedures. I was a little surprised as instead of the standard Ardmore (NZAR)-Hamilton (NZHN)-Tauranga (NZTG)-Thames (NZTH)-Ardmore route, Rob suggested we go to Waihi Beach (NZWV) instead of Thames. I have heard 'interesting' things about Waihi Beach, mostly about the crosswinds and the curved approach... but figured it would be a good challenged. So, we filed a VFR flightplan, strapped on JFY and headed out.

The approach into NZHN was interesting as the tower was on reduced capacity (whats with people wanting holidays on easter?!?!?) so the controller was busier than a one-armed paper hanger... we finally got our clearance and landed on runway 18 and taxied over to the aeroclub to fill up on gas.

Then off to NZTG where we encountered a 'newish' controller who was a bit difficult to understand and a little stressed with several aircraft arriving at once. After some to-ing and fro-ing we finally got cleared for a touch and go on runway 25 and cleared onto NZWV.

It turns out that NZWV IS a very interesting approach. I opted for 31, as while it has the tricky curved approach due to terrain and it was mostly a crosswind at the time, there was some headwind component and I wanted all the help I could get as 31 is only 500metres due to the displaced threshold.

I totally messed up the first approach, and learned a valuable lesson about overhead joins at small strips in the process... basically, give yourself plenty of room rather than trying to fly across the thresholds like you do at larger fields like NZAR. But I had recognised the problem early and just executed a go-around and setup for another approach, giving myself a bit more room and slowing up a little earlier than the first attempt. And I totally nailed it... Matt said he was impressed that I made the (correct) go-around decision early rather than trying to fight the aircraft down onto the strip.

We stopped for a bit of fresh air and a stretch and then headed back to NZAR. The shortfield take-off out of NZWV was not too bad and we cleared the fence quite comfortably. Then climbed up to 3500' for the trip across the Coromandel Ranges and back to NZAR.

It was certainly a learning experience, having to talk to controllers, follow arrival and departure procedures, talking to Christchurch Information to amend my SARTIME (Search and Rescue Time), all while trying to keep ahead of the aircraft while flying into unfamiliar territory!


This flight: 2.7 Dual
Total Hours: 98.0 (73.4 Dual, 24.6 PinC, 5.1 IFR)

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