Learning to Fly

Rotor

It had been almost 2 months and I was itching to fly. I was a little nervous that it had been so long and I would be a little out of practice, but when Daniel and I got up the ramp at about 9:30am it was blowing a good northeasterly and I didn’t want to miss it. Although there had been no rain forescast, the grass was wet up there so I assumed some had fallen over night, or early morning. I wasn’t the least concerned about wetting my wing though, as there was some flying to be done before the wind died.

We prepped our kit in less than 2 minutes and I pulled my new variometer (Flytec 6020 R$2000) out of the bag. I hadn’t had time to read the manual nor test anything so I just strapped it to my leg and hoped it would start beeping.

We took off and I felt I was a little insecure for the first couple of laps so I kept a bigger safety margin between myself and the ridge. There was no one else around though so it wasn’t long before I was skimming the ground.

I went out along the ridge toward Andradas and flew back and forth for over an hour. It was obvious the ground was quite wet though as no solid thermals were forming. There were lots of bubbles of warm air rising up off the ridge with which I could get higher than with just the lift from the breeze, but it wasn’t enough to get high enough to play around at all. I had expected it to get better as time went by but after a while I started to get a little nauseous and decided to land in Andradas.

I had wanted to see if it was possible to make it through from the northern side of the ridge traversing through to land in Andradas which is on the other side. The wind was dropping so I thought the rotor wouldn’t be as strong and it would be a good time to experience it. I swung to the right and passed over the ridge right next to the cellphone towers.

It seemed ok for the first bit. I entered the rotor and started dropping at around 3-4m/s. I noticied the openings at the front of the wing losing pressure and starting to close slightly at the tops and bottoms. I knew that if I continued to drop at that rate that I wouldn’t make Moacir’s landing spot and would have to land earlier, but I remembered the football field I had found the last time and didn’t get too worried.

After a few minutes I got out of the stronger part of the rotor and glided more easily down to the landing spot. It was a little quicker than usual, but there were no problems. I landed smoothly, packed up quickly and walked up to the main road to hitch a lift back up the hill.

Soon Moacir himself was passing by and stopped to give me a ride. When we got back up the hill the wind had switched round to the south. Daniel was almost ready to fly again too, so we both took off from the southern ramp.

I had been looking out toward the left before take off and decided that was the best way to head, but Fabinho took off seconds before me and started gaining on the righthand side so at the last minute I changed plan and followed him. I managed to gain about 60m above the ramp but the thermal was taking me further and further round the northwestern side of the ramp. Fabinho managed to get more height than I with his tandem wing and when the thermal died I didn’t have enough height to make it back across to the southern side of the hill against the headwind and had to land on the northwestern landing spot.

I wasn’t too worried about landing there as I had spoken to Guto just before take off and was expecting him to be passing at any minute. I was pretty dark at myself however for discarting my own flight plan and following Fabinho at the last minute. I had assumed he was more in the know than me, but forgotten that he had planned his flight based on his equipment and what would work for him. I should have stuck to mine.

I got a lift up with Mário and Thaís and did one more flight down to the southern landing spot before the rain came and we all went to the Baiana for a few beers and a feed.

Total flight time: 1h30mins