Texas - the Return

Naw. Not really, but I have had a chunk of time off this week in an attempt to go solo in the UK. It's also quite hot and pretty humid so that fits the Texas thing too. I flew on Tuesday and Wednesday with the plan to fly Thursday and Friday (more of that later). I was also planning to knuckle down take the Air Law and the Human Factors exams.

So Tuesday was in Alpha-November (Ah! knots!). Runway 25 in use, wind between nothing and 10kts gusts. I had an average lesson - some rough landings and some okay ones. I'm just warming up I think to myself, things like remembering that the air speed indicator is in knots, so landing at 80 is FAR TOO FAST. It was a lovely warm still/gusty day with lots of thermals and air movement from the heat.

Wednesday was much better from a flying point of view. We started again in Alpha-November. Steve started her (she has electrical problems and there's a real knack to getting her going) but we got as far as power checks to discover she was running really rough on one magneto. Some high exhaust temperature running to clear the spark plugs proved futile so we trundled back to swap over to Tango-Echo. The flying went well and Steve was talking about Solo - until I mentioned I hadn't sat the exams. Even Jamie in the tower 'knew' I was going to go. Shame. Anyway that day I sat the Air Law exam and passed (82%).

The next stage of my plan was to spend the evening and most of the next day studying Human Factors and take that exam before my Thursday lesson. And so it was. 95% on that one - all ready for my solo. The weather was good, clouds at 2000 feet or so, the odd gust of wind - nothing serious. Alpha-November had an engineer just finishing work on her as I arrived and Tango-Echo was sitting there so all looked good.

The booking before mine, Brian, was about to take Alpha-November so that left Tango-Echo for me. However as has happened they couldn't start her, so he took Tango-Echo. I watched from the cafe as he taxied out and then did some very odd manoeuvres on the apron by the power check. He then taxied back to the RedAir apron. It turns out the left brake wasn't working very well.  Even worse he worked for the AAIB and signed the aircraft U/S in the tech log. It's only a suspected hydraulic seal, but it needs an engineer and won't be fixed until tomorrow. I thought I was done for the day, but Steve had put Alpha-November's battery on charge in the mean-time so we gave that a whirl. But she wouldn't start. Sigh. So that was it. Steve ran though my exam results with me and I was off home for a beer. Here's Steve fitting the 'charged' battery followed by the offending item. To be fair Alpha-November has had a long standing problem caused by having aluminium wiring rather than copper which causes her to discard batteries once they're down to 90% capacity. Any chance we could get this fixed perhaps Islam? I figure between me and the AAIB man they lost 3 hours flying revenue this afternoon alone. I'm thinking of writing a letter - that's how I feel.