SW winds in the morning slowly turning more northerly.
Ridge and some wave.
Cloud bases slowly climbing to 5000ft in the afternoon.
First up was a check flight/BFR for one of our D Cat instructors. A tow to the ridge...24 mins which if it's split 2 ways, and at our X-country rate of $3.50 per minute, works out at $40-ish dollars each.
So there we were...practising in ridge lift and thermals up towards Thames and back and no sign of life at Piako. We assumed their tow-plane must be U/S...but no...a push out from the ridge to overfly the airfield showed a line up of gliders (by now it was 1pm)...I'm not sure daylight savings time has started in the Waikato...
However it raises the usual challenge...at 1400ft over the Wairoa River in 4 knots down do you raise the turbo (I forgot to mention that we were in the super duper Duo turbo). We were on final glide with 600ft spare...there isn't many land-out options around the river, or between the river and the airfield...the only real strip had beef cattle on it... the short answer is - in this position I think the turbo is disadvantage. There is a real risk of focusing on the "let's put the motor up" and losing sight of the option of finding a climb or a land-out option. It all happens quite quickly. But here in lies the reason for check flights...we had the chance to analysis the decision making.
Back on the ground at 1.30pm with time on my hands. I was filling in for another instructor...but we had no trial flights (something we should get used to with Part 115 looming) and, far more concerning, only one student who opted to go flying in the Pipistrel. So a quick wax and polish of the little Discus and we were off again.
A 7 knot climb off tow to 4500ft (bases were 5000ft but airspace gets in the way), followed by a run to the Kaimai's and back and then a climb in wave to 7500ft. the wave was very weak at 4500ft but by the time we climbed to 7000ft we were going up at 5-6 knots.
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