Over the last year I managed to gather my required 50 hours of solo flight time, and yesterday was a good time as any to take my exam for a passenger's license.
The exam itself was basically a revision of most elementary flight manoeuvers (stale turn, high turn, stalling, etc.), accompagnied with an additional back tow (i.e. when the cable does not release).
While I succeeded in my exam, it goes to show that even those things really have to be maintained; I was a bit rusty in performing some manoeuvers. Guess I'll be practising them a bit more.
The long awaited Condor patch v1.1.3 has been released. It fixes a critical bug with the newer nVidia drivers, and was particularly a hassle when running Condor in Windows 7.
Aside of the fix, an additional tow plane was added in the mix.
Download the patch: http://www.condorsoaring.com/downloads.htm.
So I finally got my 15 hours of solo flight time in, and worked up the nerve to take the final check for obtaining my license. And guess what...
I succeeded in obtaining my license. Yes yes, it's still a license for solo flight (still 35h fly time to go), but it's a start.
Now I can start for competition training, etc. The worlds open up, again.
Up until now, I was flying my solos with a Twin Astir II. It's a 2 seat glider which we use at our club for training (among other things).
The instructors thought it was time I moved on to something else: a Club Astir (also known as the Jeans).
The Jeans is a one seater, sort of the 1-seat equivalent of the Twin Astir I (yes, there's a difference between Twin I and II). It's a small and swift craft; not very recent, and it's a bit fickleish at times. In short: I love it!
I'll be flying this for a while, at least until I've enough hours on the thing to move up to the next glider.
Some in-flight recordings, taken when I was passenger on my orientation flight.
The footage was take with my PDA cam, so it's not very high resolution. Format is MPEG-4 with 3GPP subformat, but normally any decent media player will be able to play it back (I know that at least mplayer with AMR audio codec can).
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