Gyroplane Training 
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Web by: Rebel Systems Training Days April 7 - 22 2001 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 May 26 - June 2 2001 April 1 - 11 2002 |
Day 5 The forecast for today was looking good. So after a briefing on circuits,
off we go to get "booted and spurred". Well, here we are ready to go, that's me in the front with my triking suit. One thing I have discovered is that gyro pilots prefer to stay below 1000 feet. None of this oxygen reduced 2000 feet plus!!!
And off we go.
Conditions were pretty thermic today, so lots of correction in power, attitude and height. Since this rudder thing to me was a new axes, I kept forgetting to use it all the way down. On a trike you prepare for the front wheel to try and deflect on touching down so act against it. With a rudder you need to fly the tail through the landing so I kept getting reminded not to fix the rudder on landing. It got better after a number of landings, but still work to do. Judgment of where to start the actual descent also proved difficult to judge where to start, ending up with too much power and too much height, resulting in a steeper descent to make the target. So after a number of flaring too early, too late, (causes the instructor to heat up!), we finished the session. Lots of work to do here to get the reactions tuned to the approach. A picture of a more relaxed Martin just before his flight. You might think that his helmet looks wrong. Well, you would be right as he had inadvertently put on a medium. He came back a little later to change it to a large!
The evening was turning out to be very stable and warm. A relaxing gad about seemed appropriate to just chill out, so we just flew off around Great Orton and other places and general sightseeing. It was a useful exercise, and I was able to see how much more relaxed I felt in controlling the VPM and how much more coordinated my turns and ascent/descent and throttle control was. Spent another hour 15 minutes doing that. Roger said we could go up again for a late circuit bash, but I felt that the day had been good enough and felt another session might have been counter productive so called it a day. Forecast for tomorrow looks usable, so back to circuit bashing and hopefully sort out the rudder close to the ground and the descent. 6 Hours 50 minutes logged on the VPM so far, and good progress made. Whilst waiting for Martin to come back down, Mike was preparing his Merlin 912 to get some more test time on it. (The CAA have said he has to do 25 hours for testing!). Looks nice, but not for the novice by any means. The torque from the engine takes very good yaw control to keep it tamed.
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