Fly Away...To Horsham

The fly away to Horsham Aerodrome by our visitors from the Latrobe Valley and Gippsland was great success. Eight planes arrived on Saturday 10 November, bring 16 guests to enjoy our hospitality. The aircraft were a mixture of 5 Jabiru's and 3 Van's RV's. Most of our guests stayed in town at motels and a couple in the bunk house. We managed to get photo's of all the visiting aircraft after they had tied down. All aircraft were able to fit on the new partly sealed light aircraft tie down area.

Many visitor spent the afternoon around the clubrooms, chatting and sharing stories. Others nipped in to town or rested up for the BBQ in the evening. A few brave souls even gave gliding a try. We did a few launch flights in the Twin Astir and a couple self launched in the Janus. The evenings meal was attended by about 34 people, so there was a good balance between our visitor and local members and their friends. The evening was going so well that an emergency dash had to be made into town for more cold beer. The evening finished up around 10.30pm with a few stayers hanging in a bit longer.

Sunday started with Mike Hogan cooking breakfast at around 8.00am. Bacon and eggs cooked on the BBQ. Most of our guests headed off for home around 9.30am. Daryl and Gayle Hooke were the last to leave later in the morning. Many of our visitors on the way to Horsham and on the way home again enjoyed the scenic route around the the top end of Port Phillip Bay to avoid controlled airspace.

Those club members around for Sunday lunch dined regally on BBQ leftovers. (Sausages and burgers heated in the microwave) The whole weekend went very well. A chance to catch up with old friends and to make some new ones. A number of our members and thinking of a return visit to Latrobe Valley some time in 2008.

Fly away Weekend to...Horsham

The club is hosting a 'Fly Away weekend' by a group of pilots and their partners from Gippsland and the Latrobe Valley this coming weekend, the 10th and 11th of November. It looks like we will have around 7 aircraft and 14 crew flying in to sample our hospitality.

There is a BBQ on Saturday night at the clubrooms. If you are coming and have not put your name down on the list in the clubrooms, please contact Michael Hogan on 0409 028 895 as soon as possible. Mike is also organizing a breakfast of some sort on Sunday morning.

Max Off To Hand Over

Max Hedt has been invited to the hand over of the club's old T31 glider to the Australian Gliding Museum this coming Saturday the 11th of November at Bacchus Marsh Aerodrome. The old T31 was a resident in our hanger earlier in the year after it was repainted by Joe Luciani. She is now ready for her new life. Her is a picture of Max and some of the Museum's volunteers at when the T31 was rigged at Horsham for the first time in many years. Max will provide a full report in a future 'Fly Paper'.

Selwyn Ellis Solo's in the 230

One of the club's newest member, Selwyn Ellis made his first solo flight in the club's J230 Jabiru on Friday 26th October. Selwyn is a former member of the old Wimmera Soaring Club and was an Instructor and Tug Pilot for a number of years. Naturally Selwyn picked up his flying from were he had left it a number of years ago. PW only required a small number of dual instructional flights before letting 'Sel' off on his own again.

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Laying on the bog not the blog

Bill Fry and his son Gavin are laying on the bog. Really they are working on Bill’s Lightning project in the clubs workshop.

So there has been much mixing of body filler, waiting for it to go hard and then sanding it all off again.

It all makes sense to people who build there own planes. But the work is progressing well. Stay tuned to more news.

Phil's Jabiru Project Takes To The Air

At 11.00am this morning Phil Colquhuon passed a significant milestone with his Jabiru J200 project. After much hard work and many long months, Phil's little baby has at last taken to the air for the first time.


After some final checks and a high speed taxi run Cliff Banks gently lifted off for the first flight. Everything went very well, the plane handled perfectly and only required some minor fine tuning before its second and third flights.


Michael Sudholz and Peter Weissenfeld report that Phil was 'Very happy' with the test flights and had a smile on his face from ear to ear when Cliff applied the power and gently eased off the runway for the first test flight. Congratulations Phil. Phil is pictured below with Cliff Banks after the successful test flight.


Unfortunately a small stone was picked up by the prop and hit one of the mail wheel fairings. So now Phil has his first repair to fix. Oh well such is flying. Phil is pictured below inspecting the damage.

Jabiru J230 Aerotow Report

Details of the first four aerotows completed by the club's new Jabiru J230-D at Horsham Aerodrome.

Flight No. 1, Saturday 1st September, 1600 hours.
Wind 9-10 kts from the North. Temperature about 15 C. Takeoff from runway 35 on firm dirt with short grass with a length of 800 metres. The Jabiru was carrying about 1/2 fuel with an estimated TOW of 510 kilos. Mark Griffin flew the Jabiru and Max Hedt was solo pilot in the club's Grob G103 Twin Astir 2. The estimated TOW of the glider was 490 kgs. Thermal activity during the flight was very low. The following is Max's summary of the flight.

Mark won the hot seat as the tug pilot for the first tow. My job in the Twin was a lot easier as all I had to do was stay out of trouble in a familiar aircraft. After lining up the aircraft most of our mob took off down the strip to get photos and watch the lift off. That left Steve Schneider and Doug Norman to organize my launch.

After some discussion it was agreed that Mark should set the flaps at about 1/3 down for the tow. Mark carefully took up slack until I gave him the "Lets Go!" over the radio. Initial acceleration was a little better than I expected with only 120hp in front of us. The Twin got airborne quite quickly after a hundred plus metres.

But once up to about the 45 to 50 knots it seem that the acceleration slowed down and the Jabiru took quite a while and a fair bit of strip length to become fully airborne at about the 60 to 65 kts . Once airborne the tow became easy with the Jabiru quite stable in front. Mark was trying a 70 kt tow speed but found the climb better at about 75 kts. The wake turbulence was a lot less than the Pawnee and I found it easy to stay in a position just below the Jabiru slipstream. The reference for this position were the elevators lining up with the wings.

Flight No. 2, Saturday 1st September, 1620 hours.
Wind 9-10 kts from the North. Temperature about 15 C. Takeoff from runway 35 on firm dirt with short grass with a length of 800 metres. The Jabiru was carrying about 1/2 fuel with an estimated TOW of 510 kilos. Mark Griffin flew the Jabiru and Steve Schneider was solo pilot in the club's Grob G103 Twin Astir 2. The estimated TOW of the glider was 490 kgs. Thermal activity during the flight was very low. The following is Max's summary of the flight.

I offered the flight to Steve and had to dodge to avoid getting run over as Steve headed for the cockpit! Again the Twin got off the ground in a reasonable distance but the Jabiru stayed on the ground even longer than the first flight. The flight was completely normal to the extent that Steve took a couple of photos of the Jab in front just after becoming airborne. The release height was again 2000 ft AGL. Time by the watch, 9 minutes ground to ground for the Jabiru.

Flight No. 3, Sunday 2nd September, 1530 hours.
Wind 15 kts from the West. Temperature about 16.5 C. Takeoff from runway 26 on firm sealed strip with a length of 1330 metres. The Jabiru was carrying near full fuel with an estimated TOW of 550 kilos. Mark Griffin was again the tug pilot The club's Grob G103 Twin Astir 2 was flown solo again by Max Hedt. The estimated TOW of the glider was again 490 kgs. Thermal activity during the flight was again very low.

Take off normal, but even on the sealed strip the Jab's take off run to get airborne was quite long. Mark started some gentle turns after about 700 to 800 feet and I had absolutely no trouble to staying in position. At 1500 feet, I suggested to Mark that we try a high tow to check the effects on the J230. I carefully eased up through the slip stream to a high tow position. The reference here was the Jabs wings were just below the horizon. Mark later reported that there was no readily perceptible change in the attitude or performance of the Jab when the Twin was in high tow.

I descended to low tow and moved out to an extreme tow position out to the left off the Jab. Mark reported no problems and he still had some rudder left. I repeated this out to the right. Again, no problems. I then descended into a very low position which students can sometimes get into. I was uncomfortable to be in such a low position. Mark later said that the Jab started to slowly porpoise in pitch so we were getting close to the position limit in low tow. The release was right at 2000 ft. AGL. This flight was timed by stopwatch. The time from the start of the ground roll to release at 2000 feet was 6minutes and 26 seconds. The rate of climb for this flight was an average of 310 fpm. The Jabiru's time ground to ground was 10 minutes and 20 seconds.

Flight No. 4, Sunday 2nd September, 1520 hours.

Wind 15 kts from the West. Temperature about 16.5 C. Takeoff from runway 26 on firm sealed strip with a length of 1330 metres. The Jabiru was carrying near full fuel with an estimated TOW of 550 kilos. Mark Griffin was again the tug pilot The club's Grob G103 Twin Astir 2 was flown for the first time two up by peter Weissenfeld and Steve Schneider. There was moderate thermal activity. The following are the observations by Max and then Peter.

The usual long ground run from the Jab. The Twin got airborne after a moderate ground run. The release height was again 2000 ft AGL. The time from start of the ground roll to the release of the Twin was 6 minutes and 55 seconds. The time for the jab, ground to ground was 9 minutes and 55 seconds. Mark's comment was that it was quite a grind to get up there but when the figures are looked at, it only took another half a minute of climb with two up as against one up to reach 2000 feet. Average rate of climb including ground run with two up in the Twin Astir and near full fuel in the Jab was 290 fpm.

Peter first impressions of the Twin launch with 2 people on board was that “the acceleration was very slow with a long ground run. It took quite some time to even get the nose wheel off the ground. With a good headwind we had plenty of clearance over the fence. Once airborne the glider handled as normal. Climb rates varied between about 6ktsfont> and 1kt as there were moderate thermals and sink around”.

Some general observations from Max Hedt.

• Mark has only had four tows in total in an unfamiliar aircraft but is already starting to bring the Jab down a little quicker.

• The Jab pilots will have to remember to retract the towing flaps before accelerating during the descent.

• The initial ground acceleration is better than I anticipated but the long ground run of the J230 despite the towing prop, is something that we will have to take into account, particularly when the temperatures get into the mid 30's.

• The Jab's cylinder head temperatures are staying in the upper third of the green.

• On release and throttle reduction, the temperatures momentarily move into the yellow before settling back into the green. This may improve as the engine loosens up some more and beds in.

• We may also have to improve the sealing of the engine cooling ram air ducts with the engine cowling. Apparently doing this simple fix can improve engine cooling quite substantially.
  

• We will measure the length of the take off runs on both the glider and the Jabiru as well as timing and recording a lot of flights to build up a data base.

• My impressions are that we have an aircraft in the J 230 that even with our Twin Astir at MTOW of 580kgs, will do a respectable job of towing, taking into consideration the relatively low number of launches we are currently doing. The J 230 has a limit of 600 kgs MTOW for a glider on tow so this cuts our self launching Janus out which has a maximum of a 700kg MTOW.

• The only qualification I have is the length of the takeoff run for the J 230 to get airborne which is around 60 kts. This longer take off run also applies to normal non tow operations, something we did not expect after the performance of the little Jab which gets of the ground quite quickly.

• Another metre of wing and or 30 hp swinging a larger prop would make a very substantial difference to the tow and overall performance.

• In other aspects, the J230 is stable, easy to fly, comfortable, economical, reasonably quick even with the towing prop which gives a 112 to 115 kt cruising speed, robust and low maintenance, long range, good load carrying capacity and with a very quick parts supply from Queensland and at a very good price compared to the alternatives.

• All of our members and a couple of Aero Club members who flew it Sunday seem to be quite impressed with our purchase. We have a very good aircraft at a very good price and it will fill the general club use role very well indeed and the towing role quite adequately for the limited towing we are currently doing.

View the First J230 Aerotow

Click on the play button to view a short video of the first aerotow launch of the club's Grob Twin Astir by the J230. Mark Griffin is flying the Jabiru and Max Hedt is in the glider.

J230 Does Its First Two Tows

It happened yesterday (Saturday 1^st September) late in the afternoon. 24-5109 our new Jabiru J230 completed her first two test aerotows at Horsham Aerodrome. A number of members were around the club, some coming from near and far to witness the big event. The final few hours were flown off during the day to get the engine hours to over thirty.

(Peter and Mark check the alignment of the tug mirrors)

Max Hedt DI’d the Twin Astir while PW was taking a TIF flight in the Jabiru to the Grampains and back. Mark Griffin arrived in time to pilot the first launch. The cameras were prepared to record the big event. Mark had a briefing with Mark and a good look around the aircraft, the mirrors were adjusted and a quick circuit flown.

(Max gives Mark his 'riding instructions')

Max Hedt took up position at the very end of runway 35, the short strip. The take off would be into the North. Steve Schneider elected to run the wing, while everyone else headed for the other end of the strip to watch. Finally the Jabiru and Twin Astir commenced their ground roll. The glider lifted off first and the Jabiru further along the runway. We had lift off. The combination passed the watching spectators and continued along 35 gaining height, cleared the end fence with a respectable margin and began to climb away. The climb rate was varying between 300 and 500 feet per minute and averaged around 400 feet per minute.

(Nearly ready waiting for the tug to land after a circuit)

The first launch was to 2000 feet AGL, our standard launch height. The time for the Jabiru was just on 10 minutes from power on to wheels down and back to earth. Not bad we thought.

Steve Schneider flew the glider during the second launch. The Jabiru/Twin Astir combination took a little bit longer to get off the ground this time. The height over the end fence was respectable but not like a launch behind the old Pawnee. Again the launch was to 2000 feet and the launch time was again around 10 minutes from Power on to wheels down.

(Away they go off into the North off Runway 35)

Initial feelings were good. More test flight need to be done to determine out standard procedures. The first two launches were done on grass on the shorter of the two Horsham strips. We will see what the Jabiru/Twin Astir combination is like on the 08/26, the longer sealed strip. We are yet to go two up in the glider. All will be revealed in launches to come.

Stay tuned for further updates and photos to be uploaded as they become available.

J230 Landing At Colefield

Click on the play button of the video viewer to watch a short video of the club's new Jabiru J230-D 24-5109 landing at Colefield, Dadswells Bridge on Saturday 18th August 2007. Steve Schneider makes his first landing in the 5109 under the guidance of Peter Weissenfeld. And a very nice landing it is too.