by congo » Wed Jun 11, 2003 6:13 am
Hagar's piccy above is of a Grob Twin Astir I believe.
My first Instructional flight was in one of these.
My thoughts......... If the Instructor has a heart attack or does something really stupid..... I can handle it! Might not be pretty, but I'll walk away!
I had been flying sims for thousands of hours before the first flight.
I shared time in my early training between the Grob (a high performance sailplane) and a Blanik L-13 (lower performance).
I found that by flying both aircraft in my early training (in all weather conditions), gave me a lot of confidence and verified what I had learned on simulators.
This had the side effect of my instructors believing I was over-confident when I actually had the ability.
I went solo after 10 hours of instruction and on reflection, this was only just enough time to be safe.
On my third solo, I was thermalling at cloudbase and realised I didn't know how to read the metric altimeter in the Blanik. I had always flown "seat of the pants" using angles, sound and judgement with occasional reference to the airspeed indicator for verification of launch and landing speeds.
I think soaring in sailplanes is one of the purest forms of flight because you fly an extremely efficient and controllable machine using weather as an energy source. I love it.
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