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zotzOr I was flying, anyway. I spent a lot of yesterday at work being borderline productive, chasing up things I couldn't find and asking questions about what had and hadn't been done. Hopefully this'll bear fruit over the next few days, but it certainly didn't today. The last couple of hours were better. I spent them picking sequencing reaction that I'll hopefully perform tomorrow. After that I buggered off early to commune with some passing clouds.
A couple of years ago, I was returning on an August Sunday afternoon to Cambridge from my annual excursion to Oxfordshire, which I spend herding hippies (both for fun and for profit), when I noticed some vagrant soliciting transport by the side of the road, by the well-accepted method of raising his thumb hopefully. Naturally, I stopped to patronise the poor man with a lift. It turned out that I was heavily mistaken - far from being a tramp or vagabond, he was an amateur pilot, who had landed his glider in a nearby field on his way back form Derbyshire. Of course, the foolish man had forgotten to bring an engine with him, so he was forced to complete his journey on terra firma (which is, of course, where I entered the story). A short distance from his landing site was an airfield, it turned out. and that had been his destination. We bantered on the way, and he informed me of many wondrous things, especially regarding gliding near and north of Edinburgh. I dropped him off, and went home.
Today, I went to the house of a friend who lives near this same airfield, and his a member of the same gliding club. She's also an airline pilot, as it happens, and a fairly serious glider pilot who wins medals, but that's another story. The aim, as I said yesterday, was to get high. Two and a half thousand feet high, in this case. I parked at her house and she drive us over to the field. On the way, I mentioned my encounter with the other pilot, and worryingly she knew immediately exactly who I meant. When we got there she mentioned it to another friend who was doing something administrative, and he agreed with a laugh that they guy had probably been trying to avoid being caught landing in a field so little short of the field by getting a lift in rather than phoning and getting someone out to help. Me mate the pilot had been a little put out that he hadn't phoned in, because it's just not done for the other club members not to render immediate assistance in a case like this.
So after this had been discussed, and a couple of people had been phoned to check whether the glider we were going to use was safe and ready to fly, we opened the hangar and S put the cowlings back on and rolled it out. The beast in question actually has a small volkswagen engine at the front, with propeller, which obviously means that you don't need a tow or a tug to get airborne. It does, apparently, mean that it's not up to much as gliders go, but not having anything to compare it with, that didn't bother me a great deal. Various checks performed, it was declared airworthy, so we climbed in, strapped up and S turned the engine on. It was quite loud, so we wore headsets with microphones.
The ground was a bit rough on the takeoff run, but not really worse than I'd expected. the contrast when it all stopped was fairy strong, though. Suddenly the ground was falling away and the sky - big enough normally out here in flatland - was all around us and extended a bit below us too.
I'd never been up in something that small before, and even the smallest thing I had been in (12-seater, roughly, IIRC) was almost twenty years ago when I was too small to remember much clearly now. Also, rather than being in a metal tube peering out through a porthole, there was a big perspex canopy all around. The view was astonishing. And astonishingly unrecognisable. So where was Cambridge? It's only a couple of miles off, so where the hell was it?
Having said this, I could see a very long way, and therwe wasn't much haze. It turned out that the town just didn't show as much contrast against the flat green bits as I'd expected. There it was, in the distance, grey and a little lumpier than the bits next to it. Remarkably undramatic, which was at least satisfyingly accurate to the Cambridge that I live in. We'd decided that it would be nice to see what my work looks like from the air, so S turned the nose South and we headed down the M11 for a few miles. This involved calling Cambridge airport to find out what the right frequency for Duxford is, and then calling Duxford to tell them we'd be going over on our way down. Nobody seemed to be listening - certainly no-one was answering - so maybe it was after their bedtimes and they'd all gone home. I'd been given the stick by this point and made a careful couple of swerves left and right to get a better view of Duxford [note : apparently it's free to get in for the last hour of each day. If so, I plan to visit regularly, it being so near work. You may care to investigate this yourselves]. It looks very nice from the air, and I expect it to be even more interesting from the ground. Immediately following this, we crossed the M11 and almost instantly the Sanger hove into view.
And very nice it looks from the air too. We took a circle or two around it, and lost a bit of height a) to get a closer look and b) to annoy anyone in our team who was still there. I chatted with S about the building and its history during this, and she banked a couple of times, rather more steeply than I'd considered doing, to get a good view. "Well gosh," I informed myself, "we're a touch over a thousand feet up and banked enough that I can look vertically downwards. I do hope I've got some clean trousers at home, because I might need them." Still, she's a skilled an experienced pilot, so that sort of turn must be safe. She did it a couple more times later with no ill effects, so I suppose it's true.
After that, we flew back North a bit until we got back to the airfield, and cut the engine completely. It is a glider, after all. At this point, my task went from "keep it about two thousand feet up" to "keep it at about 55". This turned out to be easier than keeping the thing level, and after a couple of minutes turning back and forth on the way down, it was time for S to land. This she did by the simple expedient of pointing the nose down at the near edge of the field and hauling the air-brake open. Needless to say, the glider dropped like a stone and I once more had to fall back on the fact that she'd done it before so presumably knew what she was doing. About fity feet or so from a presumably terminal experience she let the brake in, eased the stick back and suddenly we were soaring low and level over a mostly even and uninterrupted lawn. Just a touch of airbrake and we were down. Very professional, I concluded as soon as I'd unclenched my buttocks. After some seconds rolling moderately smoothly, we stopped.
The rest was fairly predictable. taxi back to the hangar, make an embarrassing mess of using the rudder-bar (other way round, Graham . . .), stop, get out, turn plane round, roll back into hangar, close doors and lock up. Great fun. I must do this again real soon.
The rest of the evening has been less eventful. S drove back to her place, we had a cup of tea, listened to a spot of Neubauten
(Strategen Gegen Architekturen, IIRC) and some EBM that I didn't recognise but which was quite good, and chatted for about an hour or so. It turned out she hadn't heard the apocryphal anecdote concerning the Australian Army helicopter simulator, adnd she responded with a tale about a simulator and the Stansted airport firetruck. And then, she having been up since half-four and having flown to Marseille and back before lunchtime, she pled tiredness and I wandered back here.
Bite to eat, read papers, catch up on mail and LJ, and soon bedtime. Not a bad day, overall. One to remember. And hopefully to repeat.
Ballboy, incidentally, are absolutely fantastic. Good things do come out of Edinburgh.
A couple of years ago, I was returning on an August Sunday afternoon to Cambridge from my annual excursion to Oxfordshire, which I spend herding hippies (both for fun and for profit), when I noticed some vagrant soliciting transport by the side of the road, by the well-accepted method of raising his thumb hopefully. Naturally, I stopped to patronise the poor man with a lift. It turned out that I was heavily mistaken - far from being a tramp or vagabond, he was an amateur pilot, who had landed his glider in a nearby field on his way back form Derbyshire. Of course, the foolish man had forgotten to bring an engine with him, so he was forced to complete his journey on terra firma (which is, of course, where I entered the story). A short distance from his landing site was an airfield, it turned out. and that had been his destination. We bantered on the way, and he informed me of many wondrous things, especially regarding gliding near and north of Edinburgh. I dropped him off, and went home.
Today, I went to the house of a friend who lives near this same airfield, and his a member of the same gliding club. She's also an airline pilot, as it happens, and a fairly serious glider pilot who wins medals, but that's another story. The aim, as I said yesterday, was to get high. Two and a half thousand feet high, in this case. I parked at her house and she drive us over to the field. On the way, I mentioned my encounter with the other pilot, and worryingly she knew immediately exactly who I meant. When we got there she mentioned it to another friend who was doing something administrative, and he agreed with a laugh that they guy had probably been trying to avoid being caught landing in a field so little short of the field by getting a lift in rather than phoning and getting someone out to help. Me mate the pilot had been a little put out that he hadn't phoned in, because it's just not done for the other club members not to render immediate assistance in a case like this.
So after this had been discussed, and a couple of people had been phoned to check whether the glider we were going to use was safe and ready to fly, we opened the hangar and S put the cowlings back on and rolled it out. The beast in question actually has a small volkswagen engine at the front, with propeller, which obviously means that you don't need a tow or a tug to get airborne. It does, apparently, mean that it's not up to much as gliders go, but not having anything to compare it with, that didn't bother me a great deal. Various checks performed, it was declared airworthy, so we climbed in, strapped up and S turned the engine on. It was quite loud, so we wore headsets with microphones.
The ground was a bit rough on the takeoff run, but not really worse than I'd expected. the contrast when it all stopped was fairy strong, though. Suddenly the ground was falling away and the sky - big enough normally out here in flatland - was all around us and extended a bit below us too.
I'd never been up in something that small before, and even the smallest thing I had been in (12-seater, roughly, IIRC) was almost twenty years ago when I was too small to remember much clearly now. Also, rather than being in a metal tube peering out through a porthole, there was a big perspex canopy all around. The view was astonishing. And astonishingly unrecognisable. So where was Cambridge? It's only a couple of miles off, so where the hell was it?
Having said this, I could see a very long way, and therwe wasn't much haze. It turned out that the town just didn't show as much contrast against the flat green bits as I'd expected. There it was, in the distance, grey and a little lumpier than the bits next to it. Remarkably undramatic, which was at least satisfyingly accurate to the Cambridge that I live in. We'd decided that it would be nice to see what my work looks like from the air, so S turned the nose South and we headed down the M11 for a few miles. This involved calling Cambridge airport to find out what the right frequency for Duxford is, and then calling Duxford to tell them we'd be going over on our way down. Nobody seemed to be listening - certainly no-one was answering - so maybe it was after their bedtimes and they'd all gone home. I'd been given the stick by this point and made a careful couple of swerves left and right to get a better view of Duxford [note : apparently it's free to get in for the last hour of each day. If so, I plan to visit regularly, it being so near work. You may care to investigate this yourselves]. It looks very nice from the air, and I expect it to be even more interesting from the ground. Immediately following this, we crossed the M11 and almost instantly the Sanger hove into view.
And very nice it looks from the air too. We took a circle or two around it, and lost a bit of height a) to get a closer look and b) to annoy anyone in our team who was still there. I chatted with S about the building and its history during this, and she banked a couple of times, rather more steeply than I'd considered doing, to get a good view. "Well gosh," I informed myself, "we're a touch over a thousand feet up and banked enough that I can look vertically downwards. I do hope I've got some clean trousers at home, because I might need them." Still, she's a skilled an experienced pilot, so that sort of turn must be safe. She did it a couple more times later with no ill effects, so I suppose it's true.
After that, we flew back North a bit until we got back to the airfield, and cut the engine completely. It is a glider, after all. At this point, my task went from "keep it about two thousand feet up" to "keep it at about 55". This turned out to be easier than keeping the thing level, and after a couple of minutes turning back and forth on the way down, it was time for S to land. This she did by the simple expedient of pointing the nose down at the near edge of the field and hauling the air-brake open. Needless to say, the glider dropped like a stone and I once more had to fall back on the fact that she'd done it before so presumably knew what she was doing. About fity feet or so from a presumably terminal experience she let the brake in, eased the stick back and suddenly we were soaring low and level over a mostly even and uninterrupted lawn. Just a touch of airbrake and we were down. Very professional, I concluded as soon as I'd unclenched my buttocks. After some seconds rolling moderately smoothly, we stopped.
The rest was fairly predictable. taxi back to the hangar, make an embarrassing mess of using the rudder-bar (other way round, Graham . . .), stop, get out, turn plane round, roll back into hangar, close doors and lock up. Great fun. I must do this again real soon.
The rest of the evening has been less eventful. S drove back to her place, we had a cup of tea, listened to a spot of Neubauten
(Strategen Gegen Architekturen, IIRC) and some EBM that I didn't recognise but which was quite good, and chatted for about an hour or so. It turned out she hadn't heard the apocryphal anecdote concerning the Australian Army helicopter simulator, adnd she responded with a tale about a simulator and the Stansted airport firetruck. And then, she having been up since half-four and having flown to Marseille and back before lunchtime, she pled tiredness and I wandered back here.
Bite to eat, read papers, catch up on mail and LJ, and soon bedtime. Not a bad day, overall. One to remember. And hopefully to repeat.
Ballboy, incidentally, are absolutely fantastic. Good things do come out of Edinburgh.
