The occurrences and happenings at Shalbourne Soaring Society. A gliding club near Andover, Newbury and Hungerford.

Puch ready, Vega news

The forecast was for poor weather; it might have been wrong, so a few of us went to the airfield. We would have flown, (2500ft launches would have been on) but we were so few and things needed doing. The Puch repair/inspection was completed and it is now rigged and ready for test flying, etc. etc. The hangar was repacked, now all aircraft are rigged.

The popularity of the Vega led us to make sure that it can be extracted from the hangar with minimum effort, so it is now neatly parked in the space left by the ME7 - this is much easier than trying to put it where the Astir used to live. Please note it is secured with a trestle under a wing, not a tyre on a wing. Peter Mason kindly presented us with wing covers for it. To prevent damage to the wing covers please remove them after the a/c has been removed from the hangar and place them along with the canopy cover in the brown laundry basket provided. Put them back on before pushing the aircraft into the hangar.

The Vega flew a lot over the weekend and in the process picked up several hours worth of bugs. The standard `bug test' tape contains 20 bugs per metre and can typically be expected to reduce the efficiency of a laminar flow wing by about 10% at best L/D. When I cleaned the leading edges today there were more like 20 bugs per inch. So the last person to fly the a/c may well have thought he was flying a Ka8. Let's get into the habitof keeping it clean!

No comments:

Post a Comment