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I pulled my ladder out of my garden ‘abri’ yesterday and after clearing away all the spiders and blowing away their webs, took it across to Malbec to see if I could use it to put up the new windsock. However, although it reached the necessary height, it was much too precarious to do the job with the wind gusting and blowing the old one around once I’d uncurled the bits of it that remain from around the pole. Here’s a shot of the new windsock that I took shortly after being lowered back to ground level. That made it much easier but as it was still impossible to detach the old windsock from its mounting ring, we decided to bring the complete rotating top assembly down to ground level to do the change-over from old windsock to new and then raise the top assembly back up again. Here are a couple of shots of the Weedhopper in its ‘natural environment’ at last, ready and waiting at the top of Malbec’s runway in what I think must be the best weather we’ve had so far this year. In fact the wheels were all running freely, so the problem can only be down to the softness of the runway.
And there should be time enough for that during the coming week despite there being a forecast of a down-turn in the weather for a day or so. This is because the geotiffs can be directly loaded into MemoryMap that I purchased years ago and still have, but now on an Asus 7″ tablet as well as my PC and it’s this that I use to create routes on my PC and fly with in my aircraft. And it’s from images of my route grabbed off my PC that the following shots were taken.
By then Roland and his wife had left for lunch so after a quick turn-round, I was off south for Sarlat Domme. By now the visibility was reducing a bit but the main thing was that the wind from the east was increasing, as was the turbulence. In my haste I’d forgotten to remove it – a lesson learned – but I wasn’t too worried. If I can’t land the Savannah at Galinat by now without a proper airspeed read out then I shouldn’t be flying at all, and so it proved.
Bit of fun
The airfield was still much too soggy and wet to even think about using it for its intended purpose so the aircraft stayed in the hangar and the barn where they’ve been for the past few months. OK, it’s not up to the kind of quality that serious hobbyists and Wim have, but it works, dammit! All you need to do is charge the lithium battery, insert six AA batteries into the controller and you’re good to go, ready to get out there and start performing graceful loops, rolls and aerobatics with your new model. It’ll need a few more mows to get it looking properly ship-shape again but today was a good start. The next thing will be to get hold of a new windsock to replace the existing one that has now been reduced to tatters. When we reattached them all for some reason we just couldn’t get them in the right order even though we had the wiring diagram, and things like flashers didn’t work when they should have.
A perfectly good landing that I was very happy with after such a long lay-off. It was great to be back at Galinat and here are some https://cryptolisting.org/ shots that I took there. First you get delayed leaving home and then when you’re preparing the aircraft, unexpected things crop up.
Some Tips on Crypto
After the unexpectedly lovely day that we enjoyed yesterday we had overnight rain – and from the look of it, in buckets. This inevitably meant that all of the recent progress made at Malbec in getting a runway dry enough to begin using was not only undone but several steps were also made backwards. I dropped into the airfield in the early evening after the rain had stopped for several hours and not only was there again standing water on the runway, the ground outside the hangar exit had once again been reduced to a swamp. I find the latter simpler because you can then use ‘N’ to designate our northern latitudes and ‘E’ and ‘W’ for longitudes. However, if you need to describe a route by defining several lat/long points you just add each one in the same format in the ‘Route’ box with a space between them eg 5101N00132E 5101N00027W . Then apart from only ticking boxes on the flight plan form that are relevant (ie no ‘X’s or ‘0’s for items that do not apply) you should never have another flightplan rejected and have to start pulling your hair out wondering why.
That was reflected by the fact that the market took the news in its stride with the shares opening up and rising 1.5% in early trading, in line with the generally positive market mood,’ he says. The Blade star has linked up with a new messaging app called NYNJA which utilizes cryptocurrency ltbcoin – and he believes it’s the future of movie-making. When workers complete their work, they earn NYNJAcoin or ‘NYN’, which they can use to purchase additional data, new apps, other goods and services within the NYNJA ecosystem and other digital currencies outside of NYNJA.
Here are several shots that I took of it after the completion of several hours of work that I think show that the effort was justified. Once a final route has been decided upon, then it’s time to start crunching the numbers. I do this even though I’ll be using my GPS-based navaid while flying, mainly because I want to be absolutely sure about leg timings and my refuelling arrangements. I use my own excel spreadsheet for this and the image below shows the plan for the selected route.
On final I had to pull the power back quite sharply because despite the day still being relatively cool compared to yesterday, there was still plenty of thermal lift trying to force me upwards. So as I was only a short way out with a runway of only 160 metres to land on, I had to keep concentrating on keeping my approach low and my speed within limits to avoid the embarrassment of having to dump the Weedhopper down with too much groundspeed. When I cleaned it the other day, I found that the special ‘vernis’ that the previous owners had applied to the fabric was massively flaking off the yellow upper surfaces, the wings especially. If I leave it, although the fabric itself is in good condition, I’m sure that the selling price of the aircraft will be drastically reduced, so I need to do something to improve its appearance. This immediately revealed where diversions would need to be made around controlled airspace etc and the next consideration was where to land to refuel.
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Visibility from the Weedhopper is superb, much better than either the X-Air or the Savannah and despite any trepidation that I might have had, my landing was good if not totally textbook. But this was a relief nevertheless, as a first landing in an unfamiliar aircraft always is, and I taxied up to the top of the runway and shut down. There I did a thorough walk round and visual inspection to ensure that nothing had dropped off or was loose and it was time for another go.
I came home via the ‘Cote de Jord’ from where the paragliders fly when there’s a favourable southerly breeze and took a couple of shots of the valley below looking towards St-Léon-sur-Vézère from the point where they jump off the top of the hill. This morning I spent about half an hour rubbing the top down to reduce the scratches and then applied teak oil to it, which still smells lovely as I type this. I was very pleased with the results and although I originally intended to rub it down a bit more, I probably won’t as I think that an old table needs a few marks on it. I insisted that the maximum I’d be prepared to pay was 100€ and he suggested, what about 110€?
- And another respectable one, making three-out-of-three leaving me with a feeling of satisfaction and a smile on my face.
- I was very pleased with the results and although I originally intended to rub it down a bit more, I probably won’t as I think that an old table needs a few marks on it.
- Wood will provide engineering and project management services to develop the Marjan oil field, located in the country’s eastern province as part of the contract.
- Nevertheless, I was determined to start making some moves with the Savannah which has been languishing in the hangar for far too long.
But this still wouldn’t solve the mudguard fouling problem, and the only way to do that would be for the end of the towbar that connects to the nose wheel to be in a ‘U’ shape so when the towbar is lowered, the sides of the ‘U’ clear it. This was to be a simple ‘T’ design with a pin at each end of the ‘T’ to drop into the two holes at each end of the crossbar. The pins were to have holes drilled in them through which securing pins would have been located to ensure that the towing pins could not come out of the holes, allowing the aircraft to be pulled or pushed in safety. At present the crossbar that was intended for my original towbar design is still attached to the nose wheel fork. So then I had to raise the Savannah’s nose wheel up onto blocks to give easy access to the nose wheel for me to take the measurements that I needed.
Actor Wesley Snipes gets into the cyrptocurrency game
I’d taken the keys to all of my three aircraft with me but hadn’t really thought about flying when it dawned on me that today was the perfect day for testing out the Weedhopper. So after putting the ride-on mower to bed, I pulled it out of the barn and taxied it across to the top of the runway . Unfortunately, when they left they took the sunshine with them and it only returned today, too late to take up another eager young member of Wim’s family with aspirations of becoming a pilot who wanted to fly yesterday. But for me today was the start of getting the X-Air ready to advertise and sell.
When I originally flew my old AX3 from the UK to the Dordogne back in 2012 I didn’t use Sky Demon. Instead I just used charts that I’d scanned off the internet and loaded into MemoryMap on my PC and a cheap Chinese satnav and did everything else myself and in principle I still do the same. When I purchase the new Cartabossy French aviation charts each year, I also get a link to download them as geotiffs. This for me is the real value because from then on I confess that although I carry the paper charts with me, they remain unopened. Well, luckily the damage to the Savannah’s wing tip is confined just to the slat so repairing it will be no problem. The reason is that there’s a factory kit to convert the wing design from slatted to vortex generator that involves removing the slats and replacing the leading edges of each wing with new ones with a larger profile and vortex generator tabs.
Then I was off to the swamp, because that’s what the airfield and the hangar front entrance in particular, are beginning to resemble, to see how the results of my work measured up. The last time I did this for the X-Air just over two years ago, I had to download the relevant paperwork from the DGAC’s web site, fill it in and send it off. This was the system when I first came to France and eventually you received a new ‘Carte d’Identification’ for your aircraft which lasted for the next two years, after which you’d repeat the process. I spotted one that was ideal and at only 90€ but it was way down south in the Haute Garonne, a journey there and back of some 640 kms .