It would have been nice to celebrate January 1st by going flying but the weather wasn’t cooperating. Winds up here in the mountains often squash even the best plans and January 1st was no exception.
A weak cold front was moving through the area and kicked up the winds to the 25-30 knot range – not something I wanted to brave just to say I flew on the first day of the year. Instead I stayed warm and watched a few football games.
I finally got the Swift into the air on December 31st after a month without flying. No serious reasons, jut a combination of work and weather.
Yesterday dawned with just high clouds and little to no wind and was forecast to stay that way so I headed for the airport.
First I plugged in my little ceramic heater and let it do its job of blowing hot air into the bottom of the cowling. I knew that was going to take a while since the outside air temperature was only in the high 30s at that point so I went across the way to a friend’s hangar to hang out for a while.
The weather forecasters were saying that this past weekend was going to be great weather but a cold front was on the way and scheduled to arrive by Tuesday. Apparently several other people thought the same as I and decided to get into the air before the weather changed.
On Saturday I thought I’d spend some time in the traffic pattern practicing landings. Good idea but I wasn’t the only one who had it. I took off and stayed in the pattern but by my third time around I had been joined by four other planes or varying types speeds.
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