The Power of Observation

I've flown three times in the last 5 months and that type of deficiency can cause a variety of ailments. One would be that it lessens your power of Observation. Let's use my last flight as an example - a bit of background information first. One of the really nice things about the flying in Bright Australia is that the quality of pilot here is very high. A few days ago I had the pleasure of flying with Bright local and 6 time Australian National Champ, Fred Gungl, and it's great to have someone that can keep up with me (they call this being cheeky in Oz).

Flying with people that know what they are doing helps you go places and can be very instructive especially when they say intelligent things over the radio. Take the other day for example. The sky was fairly overcast and I was in a climb on the west side of Goldmine, and Fred in a climb on the east side of Goldmine. Fred called out his climb strength which was about the same as mine so I stayed where I was. Then Fred called and said that there was a cloud forming between us, and sure enough, looking up I see this beautiful little cloud and it was growing fast. I should have seen that cloud on my own. I moved my turns toward the cloud and my climb rate increased and I was at base soon after.

Speaking of clouds, Fred had another interesting observation in response to someone saying they thought the clouds looked scary, he said that the overcast sky made the cloud bottoms look darker than they should have been based on the cloud height. The clouds ended up being benign and it was great fun flying up to the bottom and then out around the edge and looking down at base.

The Weather

The weather is very different here this year, it has rained more in the last week than it did during my 5 months here last year. El Nino ended a while back and this has increased rainfall which should lessen the bush fires that were such a disaster last year. I think the moisture should give us more cloud days and flying with cloud is the stuff of dreams.

Ciao