What an experience flying the PTAR again this year! Last year was my first and with experienced navigator we ended up in the middle of the pack. What a breeze I thought? Big was the surprise this year when we got caught out by the strong wind.
Day one saw us flying from New Tempe to Barkley East, to Gariep dam and back. The weatherman warned us about the strong frontal winds and we (as everyone else) opted to use the quartering tailwind to our benefit on the long leg down to Barkley East. Little did we know that the wind would also be our demise as it drifted us much further down our track than anticipated.
By the time we worked out our ground references were no longer reflected on the map and the fact that we had to climb to 10500 feet to avoid high terrain (our map only had the terrain on our course at 8000 feet) we were almost 20 miles off track!
How did this happen? Very quickly when you don't pay VERY close attention to your route and heading. Once oriented again and back on track we necountered some severe turbulance; Roter. This was not fun at all. Another pilot was hospitalised with a fractured vertibra as result of the turbulance... We got through it in about ten minutes before we were eventually at our intented turning point, Barkey East. This was a bit of a wakeup call and we paid much closer attention to our track and progress against planned time. The rest of the course went to plan but our earlier mistake cost us 31 minutes over the 360nm course.
Day two saw much shorter legs and with the field taking off in reverse sequence had the aircraft catching up on each other. This made the turns very interesting. We manged to fly our designated handcicap of 135.6 knots (which I thought was not possible in a 33-year old C182). This time we were on track and actually made very good time. The damage was done though and the end result not nearly as good as we had hoped for.
Overall a great learning experience and the fact that GPS is not allowed seperates the real pilots from the gadget-followers.
A great thank-you to Robin and his team from SAPFA for organising another great event. We'll be back next year, but hopefully more prepared!
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