The final competition day for the year was held at Bathurst Aerodrome. It was hoped to have held the day at Wardell, but with the strong winds that were forecast, and did eventuate, it was moved back to the aerodrome.

The day could be best described as a character building day with strong winds making flying conditions quite demanding.

The first event was a short field take off with obstacle clearance climb. Most pilots had no trouble with this and adopted the correct technique. Select 10 degrees of flap, hold on the brakes (providing the surface is ok) increase power until in the green, release the brakes, rotate at 50 knots and climb at 56 knots. Once clear of obstacle, take up flap and resume the normal climb.

The short field landing was not too bad with most able to land and pull up in the selected distance. I might add that the wind was a help in this regard, but the approach still had to be set up correctly.

The conditions on the day made the instrument climb more demanding than usual and marks were down accordingly.

The compass turns were not well carried out and only two were able to score good marks. It is not often we have to use the compass alone to navigate, but vacuum pumps can and do fail and this of course will leave you without a directional indicator. Because of the magnetic dip we encounter in our region, there are some errors in the compass that we have to allow for if we are to fly accurately when making turns. The best way to remember is to use the word “ONUS”, which means overshoot when turning on to northerly headings and undershoot when turning on to southerly headings.

As an example, if we are turning from an easterly heading on to north, we must first pass through 360 degrees to an indicated heading of 340 degrees before levelling the aircraft. If we are turning from a westerly heading to 180 degrees, we must discontinue our turn when the compass is indicating 200 degrees. No allowance needs to be made when turning on to easterly or westerly headings.

The other problems we have with the compass are acceleration errors. When the aircraft is accelerating, we have an apparent turn to south, and when decelerating an apparent turn to north.

Most achieved the right result in the emergency landing, but once again few chose to clear the engine on the way down. The strong winds made this task more interesting.

Congratulations to Kingsley Picker, who took the honours on the day with 61 points from Peter Ticehurst on 56.5 and Chris Grady on 55.5 points.

Jerry Trevor-Jones