Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

An old Fix-er-Up

A few of the members in the club are getting together over the winter to fix up one of the old gliders. The old glider is a "Rhönlerche II", and needs to be completely recovered. This will take a few years to do, and I will probably be gone back to the United States by the time it's done, but I decided to help out anyway, since it is a vintage glider with lots of class. I never have seen this old bird actually fly. It was already grounded by the time I showed up last year. It sat unloved in the hangar for the whole flying season of 2008. Maybe by 2010 she will be flying again.

I set up a web site (using Google Apps, of course) so that the people who work on the glider (Mitchrampfer) could have some place to keep track of all of the work they do. They are meeting tonight to recover and refinish the elevator. The website is http://www.hb-664.ch/ . Here is a picture of Dänu after a flight in the Rhönlady.

Long Off-Season

October 27th was a while ago. That was the last weekend day of operations in the flying club in Bern. It's December now. I'm kind of frustrated about how long the winter can be here. Anyway, here is a video put together by Christoph Schlaeppi about the landing competition we had on the last few days of operations in the club. I managed to eek out second place! I couldn't do better than the winner who scored two perfect scores on his first two tries. This video is imbedded directly from Christoph's website, and I don't know if he has the bandwidth to handle it, so if it is a slower than what you expect from YouTube, I apologize in advance.