Monday, August 30, 2010
Flying dogs and tail draggers
With an early start from Stauning, mid west cost Denmark, we fuelled and flew half an hour north back to Morso to collect my shoes that I left at the club a few weeks ago;
No one was there that early so we pushed on for Viborg where we had arranged to catch up with Orla.
Orla, Lars, Mercedes and us :)
I missed the chance to ask Orla about his Stinson when we met on Endelava so it was great to have a few hours with him to look at it. He described is as a Cadillac of the air – it has bearing raced pushrod controls and no supporting brace wires for the tailplane as was requried for similar planes of the era. The air vent and door handles are streamlines deco designs and the control yokes are funky large lying down 'D' shapes.
Love that 30's panel!
When Orla offered to take us for a fly, we jumped at the chance! What a lovely plane, light and low powerd, needing only 90 hp to lift its tail after a few meters of the excellent Viborg grass runway, the Stinson exhibited unusual directness of connection to the airflow through the smooth light controls. Orla deftly held it within a few feet of the ground to accellerate for a few seconds before petting the nose rise for a slow climb out over conifers and a lake.
After letting me fly a large orbit around Viborg town with a few steep turns and speed changes to investigate the plane further, Orla made a touch and go and a low level circuit over the lake before three pointing us back on the grass to taxi up to the club house with the Stinson wagging its tail occasionally, as tail draggers do to catch the plane from swinging around on the ground due to their instability (CG behind main wheels, not in front as in a nose wheel plane – once the tail starts to go, you have to catch it sharpish or you ground loop. They are fun to taxi, feeling a little like a powerslide in a rear wheel drive car).
Wow. I am so impressed with this aeroplane. In basic terms, it seems that by the late 30's, the single engine piston plane was a mature design which hasn't improved since. Lars flew up to Viborg to meet us for a chat and he took Helen for a spin in his STOL. She agrees that the lack of ground run and climb rate is amazing. As always, Lars was accompanied by his daughter's poodle, Mercedes who sits on the parcel shelf of his plane with mini dog ear muffs on in flight. When Lars and I were flying his STOL over Stauning a few days earlier, I was interested to feel the small dog looking over my shoulder as he applied landing flap – she know from expereince that that means arrival at a new destination and looks out the windscreen to see where we are! Totally unfazed, she seems to quite like flying.
Note Mercedes behind me in Lars' STOL;
Lars and Mercedes sitting on warm cowl of Lars built Savanna STOL;
The Danes have a clever rainfall radar overlaid on a synoptic chart depicting hourly forecasts for three days ahead and this showed that we has about an hour before the heavens were to open in a serious fashion. Someone (not us) must have been failing in their tributes to Thor and we were about to wear the consequences. The good news was that our destination, Arhus, was somewhat in the direction that the rain was moving in from, so we planned to depart as it started, outrun it and unload and tie down quickly upon arrival. Orla brough up the best Danish I've tasted yet – a 'heavy' pie they call it, with dense sweet custardy pastry goodness and a spotted combination of chocolate and vanilla icing. We all sat around with coffees and looked through a photo log of Orla's restoration of a larger 4 seater Stinson in the 70s. He described the fabric covering techniques used for these tubular frame planes which includes dope to tighten, then reflective silver paint before undercoat and topcoats. Having worked in airforce helicopter search and rescue for many years, Orla could give us a few tips on emergency procedures for ditching in water, should the need ever arise. He told us about the trade off when briefing passengers between making them aware of what they should do in an emergency and making them irrationally scared which was interesting in light of my experience with Clare in the plane. She felt much better once I talked her through our emergency landing procedure. I'll have to keep that in mind in future when I'm flying with people that usually don't.
Private box hedge maze! ROFL, those neighbours must be GREEN;
Finally - all the KZs in one place - Danish plane heaven;
Anchor locker on a Catalina flying boat;
My favourite fighter, in the metal! There is a VHS tape about Falcon F16s in the club here where we are at the moment and I'm considering torturing Helen by putting it on.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Danish islands, fish and tractors
Happy to be back on flat land, we said hello to the glider pilots of Lemvig. Knud, the chairman, welcomed us and introduced us to Patrick who has liven in the both the UK and Australia in the past. Both have worked for Bang and Olufsen which is based locally. Patrick took us for a drive around the area and we checked out a museum to the many thousands of ships that have been wrecked on the Danish NW coast over the years.
The area is a popular holiday spot and there were many German families about. We are sorry about this, the fellows told us but tomorrow is the annual regional Tractor Pull contest. Jeepers. Scary stuff. I should have guessed that people would take tractors this seriously. Some of these beasts are build particularly for the event and not driven otherwise. The guys at the club filtered through to say hi over the next few days and we gathered some destination advice and learned a little about how they fly. Helen really likes the motorgliders so we might see if we can find her a flight in one at some point.
Lemvig town;
A visit to the local fish festival proved fruitful;
Sporting new caps emblazened with the club's sponsor bank, we said farewell and hopped 20 mins north to the inland Danish island of Mors. O with a line through it is the one letter word for 'island', hence Morso. The large old club there has some impressive machines. The land was bought from a farmer in a recession in the 70's with enough productive farm land around the runway and club house that after 30 years of operation, the club is able to operate a sizeable fleet of state of the art gliders at very low cost for the members. Impressive and quite inspirational. We cycled into the town on the island for a leg stretch and a haircut. After tea with a steady 5kt down the runway and the sun low on the horizon, we decided to get airbourne so that Helen could fly some circuits. By the end of the 45 minutes she was doing surprisingly well, particularly since she hasn't had that much handling practise yet. At least she knows what is involved in landing a plane now. Maybe I can expect a stop to the typical eating and chatting on final approach while I'm sweating to juggle the plane down final through a turbulent crosswind. It was great fun flying the training curcuits so I'll have to hand the controls over enroute more often. Flying isn't like driving in terms of needing a license to fly a plane. The pilot in command assumes responsibility for the safety of the flight which can be achieved by anyone flying.
Mountains of Norway - click pics for large versions
With a forecast over the next few days for deteriorating weather, we climbed slowly away from the high altitude runway of Klanten to see if it would be possible to fly over the high central Norweigen mountain range. The weather is so localised and variable over the mountains that all we could tell from the current day's forecast was that success was not certain – cloud covered much of the area at a level just below the top of the granite range.
Photographs of landscapes never really capture the breathtaking magnitude of distance and height scales. All I can say is that the hour airborne over the top was the single most amazing and terrifying that I have lived yet. It alone was easily worth 6 month of plane construction. Flying on the updraft side of the valleys in the flukey mountain winds, we had rock 50 feet away out one widow and a sheer canyon drop of 4000 feet out the other. Snow patches dotted the martian landscape at the top of the mountains even in this, the last month of spring. The easterly side of the mountain range (the land side, from which we approached) is serisouly wild and cracked up. About 5 times on the way up, I was ready to turn around and retreat due to low clouds and rain but cold always see a brightspot ahead in a direction that combined suitably with the terrain (suitable, as in, allowing us not to fly into it) to head for.
My backup plan of climbing on instruments into the clouds to descend over the water near Bergen turned out not to be required. The digital instruments in the Jabiru were excellent. By comparing air speed and heading with GPS derived ground speed and track, the machine gave us an instantaneous wind speed and direction indication which we used to keep out of sink which would easily exceed the plane's ability to climb in the thin air at that altitude. The terrain database on the GPS allowed me to 'see ahead' and have the confidence to continue. The western side of the range drops into cavernous fjords with towering green ridges between them. As we proceeded west into the Sognal fjord, alpine villages on the valley floor thousands of feet directly below us became apparent. As we proceeded down into the Sognal fjord, the valley opened out to allow a view of better weather ahead.
We were both somewhat speechless for about 20 minutes over the top, though I do remeber a few classics from Helen; "They say that NZ is like Norway, well, I think that Norway is even MORE like Norway" and while photographing, "I just can't zoom out any further!"
Near the top of the Sogndal fjord is Sogndal airport, ususally approached as a destination highlight from the west by flying up the fjord. Although incredible in itself, the precarious tarmac runway cut into the steep side of the fjord, a few thousand feet high above the water seemed like a comfortable and safe haven to us as we positioned way too high for final approach. The visual perspective made the runway approach unlike any other that I've ever made before and I was too conservative with height and decided to go around for a look at the village and a second attempt. Once down and shutdown we ate some congratulatory muesli bars in the cockpit then headed for the control tower building to say hello. The fire and control buidlings are proper Norweigen alpine construction and fit out. The super friendly operations man was watching biathalon sytle shooting on TV and told us "the controlled in the tower want to talk to you". Oh no, I thought back over our approach and landing wondering what I was about to get in trouble for. It turned out that all he wanted to know was whether we would mind him putting a photo of the Jabiru up on his facebook page. The fire guys ran out and snapped Oscar Lima while we chatted to the controller about the position of the power cables that span the valley in several places in the lower section of the Fjord. We thought a Norweigean alpine airport was interesting. He thought our Jabiru was interesting. Everyone was happy. On to Bergen.
How AMAZING is this landscape!?
Norwegian Fjords
The main Bergen airport is on an island to the west (sea side) of the city. Having had a good day and since the airspace wasn't too busy when we approached, I requested a lap of the airport's control zone at low level over the city before landing. No problem, they said, just not above 1000 feet. 'Don't mind if we do', we said (or something more formal and internationally understood to that effect), chopped the throttle, held the nose up, stuck out one stage of flap for a nice slow docile scenic cruise configuration and out over Bergen at 800' we went.
Most picturesque VOR (radio navigation range) goes to Bergen;
The only affordabe thing in Norway is fuel. They are independant of the EU and hydrocarbon rich, with the higheset GPD per capita on the planet. We bough a sum total of one packet of potato chips, when the man at the supermarket register assumed a scornful frown and confiscated the 6 pack I brought to him. No beer sir, it is after 8pm. Hmmm. Great. No midnight 24 hr bottlo runs in Norway then. These northern countries keep their light deprived citizens sober most of the time through a combination of only selling light beer anywhere outside the central monopoly retailer, huge taxes and stunts like this one.
After a tough couple of days, we wanted to head back to Denmark to see meet some people that we had been emailing at gliding clubs. A straight course direct from Bergen to North West Denmark wasnt possible due to showers over the hills. Instead we flew down a fjord to the coast and skirted along to the west of the terrain. We were still stopped by a warm front's steady rain and foced to divet into Stavegner in SW Norway where we were given more cheap fuel, a cup of coffee and a briefing room with PC for a few hours to wait out the weather.
Walking back out to our plane with 10 minutes until our flight plannned departure time (required since we were flying OS) we saw a very unusual sight. Not having seen another Jabiru for a month, there were 5 in a row between two hangers. Out walks Mr Jabiru Scandinavia. He crawled under our plane to marvel at the model updates and congratulated us on a swift and neat build. It was sad that we couldn't stay longer to chat but had to board for departure to Denmark.
Samso
People had been telling us about a brilliant holiday island half an hour north of Funen called Samso so we decided to check it out. What a brilliant place! The scale of Samso makes if perfect for cycling and with a population of circa 3000 people, there are quite a few things happening. Samso is renown as being energy self sufficient. The high wind and low population allow them to export more power from turbines than they use. There is a renewable energy learning centre here and many American students here for the summer as part of their 'renewable energy' courses.
This is the classic Danish church style;
The girls tried to help Guntraum and me from getting lost on our bikes;
'Antiques';
Best of all was Rune, the energetic dynamo that operates the airfield and Samso Air Services doing ferry and scenic flights in a 6 seater Cessna 206. 
What a champion – he has fitted out a club house with bathroom and wood heater 'Terminal 1' and is working on a second larger building, 'Terminal 2'. Unperturbed by being temporarily stymied by beuracracy, Rune has arranged bikes and kayaks for visitors. Clare and Guntraum adjusted up a pair of bikes for themselves and the four of us set out to explore the island. As 'the garden of Denmark', every second house has veggies out the front for sale so we stocked up on freshly picked corn and cabbage. What a great scale of island! 30 kms allowed us to see most of the southern half including 5 or 6 villages in one day. The harbour town has fish smokeries and low key cafes.
The ferry arrangements and politics of the island are very interesting and we spend time discussing the exciting air transport ideas that Rune has for the future. He has recently built a house for his wife Ewa and daughter Mille.
The ferry arrangements and politics of the island are very interesting and we spend time discussing the exciting air transport ideas that Rune has for the future. He has recently built a house for his wife Ewa and daughter Mille.
They invited us to stay with them and he explained how he had designed and built their highly insulated two story classic timber home. Beautiful.
We kayaked on what we have since discovered was the oldest Viking port, with timber peirs in the water installed between 250 - 500 AD!
Rune teaches aviation to a quarter of the students at the local boarding high school, which he attended himself in the 80s. The lessons run for 3 hrs in the evening and since our visit coincided with the first lesson of term, he asked me to tell the class about our construction and tour 2010 project. I filtered 150 photos out of our collection and grabbed a few interesting pass around objects from the cockpit (pilot's kneeboard, emergency beacon, headset, MSR stove...). Fun evening, the students were smart and interested and I managed to avoid having to implement Clare's professional techer emergency techniques of 'stare of death' and 'ominous silence'. Rune's course covers the basics of navigation, aerodynamics and meterology and I think it is an utterly brilliant way to give the 15-17 year olds a practical use and interest in the knoweldge and skills involved, not to mention some motivation to study – once they pass their exams they go flying! I wish such an arrangement had applied to 3rd year fluid mechanics.
Rune makes annual trips to lead tour groups in NZ so we at stoked that he will be able to come and fly with us over the Barrier Reef sooner rather than later. While airborne on a sight seeing flight, as we were climbing out from Samso, he radio called in an inimitable Kiwi style, "see you on the West Island!". Samso. What a gem.
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