BlogPPG

There’s a PPG pilot who moved here from Michigan who just found the group. He was going to be there and I wanted to meet him. So I got out of work as quickly as possible, got home, packed up, and headed for the field.

I was the first one at the field. I was surprised by how little wind there was.. it was forecast to be 5 or 6 mph, but I bet there was only about 2 mph. The wind was out of the north-northwest, so I headed to the southeast corner of the field and set up with the Muse again. Mike S. arrived shortly after me. While I was getting ready to launch, everyone started arriving. I was strapped in and ready to go, so I went ahead and did my thing.
This was a pretty eventful launch. I had noticed that the wind was starting to come more straight out of the north and getting a bit shifty. With me being at the extreme southeast corner of the field, I couldn’t move to my right (east) more than a few feet without getting off the mowed part of the field and into the tall weeds. Well, of course when I pulled the wing up it didn’t want to get centered.. I did some zig-zag running trying to stay underneath the wing before it finally settled above me on a northeast course — straight off the edge of the mowed part of the field. I was getting light and I knew I was about to lift off, so I decided to stick with it. I ran a lot farther than I thought I would through the weeds… some of them were tall bushes, but I just kept plowing on! I finally got off the ground just about 20 feet before I would have gone into the ditch. WHEW! That one was hairy!!!

My car is the blue SUV on the right. I ran right across that right edge and then veered right through the weeds and barely cleared the ditch at the top edge.

Mike took off after me and we headed south. Since there was almost no wind it was certainly safe to fly downwind. Mike kind of did his own thing as I did mine. About a half hour later I still didn’t see anyone in the air, so I headed back toward the field to see what was up. There was everyone, laid out and still on the ground. I heard later that everyone had a really hard time taking off. One pilot never got off. It was tough with the light shifty wind.

Here’s a parting (boring) shot:

I flew around for about 55 minutes. It was getting dark so I landed. Man it gets dark early now!!! I got to breifly meet the new pilot, Matt. He’s cool! I talked with one of the new student pilots, Tony, until it was pretty late. We took turns running next to his sport bike and using the speedometer to see how fast we could run. I hit 15 mph in a dead sprint.

We made plans to meet up in the morning. Time to go home and get some sleep!

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