Wonthaggi II

Friday I made my tracks in the morning for Wonthaggi, again.Two weeks ago, I was on the desal plant site to resolve a stuff up - the forklift mast was too tall for the site conditions. After taking the forklift back to base and changing the mast to a suitable one I arranged to have the unit delivered to the site again a few days ago. Friday I was there to do the handover of the asset. And this time, all was well.

I could not resist stopping by Kilcundra again and look out to the Bass Straits. Beyond this lookout far away is Tassie. I also took a picture of the Kilcundra "town" which is effectively a row of shops and some houses nearby.

Flight To Cowes And Wonthaggi

Saturday 20 December was a glorious day weather wise. A friend Yik came out with me to Moorabbin for a flight to Cowes (Philip Island) and Wonthaggi. I wanted to recap some VOR intercept work and had invited him to come along for his first flight in Australia.

YIK (IVAN YEONG)

ROYAL VIC AERO CLUB FLIGHT LINE

GETTING READY TO DEPART

We took off in our Warrior VH-BZE on Rwy 17R. Having tuned and identified CWS VOR, I dialed in 159 deg Magnetic on the CDI and tracked for Cowes.

LINING UP 17R

IFR EQUIPPED PA28 WITH GARMIN GNS430

Passing overhead the CWS VOR station 20 minutes later I turned our plane on an outbound track of 072 deg Magnetic to the WON station. WON was only 19 NM away and so soon enough I tuned to its station and made an inbound track of072. Having passed overhead WON station I turned us to 308 deg outbound and headed back to YMMB Moorabbin.

Yik had control of the plane for a while when were on cruise. He felt a little dizzy when we flew towards the WON ground station as the wind over the terrain caused slight turbulence. Other than that he enjoyed the flight.

PHILIP ISLAND

THE COWES GROUND STATION IS SITUATED ADJACENT TO THIS GRAN PRIX BIKE TRACK ON PHILIP ISLAND

LANDING

It was a good day. I got my fix.

Finding Small Towns & Airfields

As part of the CPL flight training and test I have to be able to find ground features such as small towns and airfields by dead reckoning given a certain heading from a place eg divert from Ballarat Airport (YBLT) north to Clunes which is a relatively "big" town with a railway line going into the town from the south and several major roads branching out from the town. Then track overhead Clunes to the north east and find a small town Franklinford and from there track to Kyneton airfield (YKTN). Now Franklinford in this case consists only of a few small houses and the way to find it would be to identify Daylesford to the south which is a town of several hundred houses and follow the main road out of Daylesford to find Franklinford. All the time this is happening in the air flying an airplane and I have to cater to things like the wind blowing me off track, and estimating time to reach the town; on top of having to find it when I think I am about to reach it.

The work load is extremely high at that time when I am looking and looking but not seeing the big picture. The "big picture" to look out for is to find bigger features in the vicinity such as power lines, railway lines, major roads, rivers, creeks before zooming in on the target town. This is to be able to confirm that I have reached my target feature. Then compare the size of the town to the chart, seeing how many roads come into the town etc before confirming it is the town I am looking for.

Today I went flying, tasked by my instructor to find two small private airfields which are not in ERSA (I would not even call them airfields, just aircraft landing areas or grass strips) and a small town. I was asked by him to take pictures of the required ground features and show them to him when I returned. I thought it interesting to show the pictures because from 4000 ft up in the air the features were quite difficult to see. Nonetheless I accomplished the task, with some difficulty, and wasted sometime tracking back and forth looking for the second feature (Labertouche).

Bunyip grass strip

Labertouche grass strip

Berrys Creek

Rather than coming back to Moorabbin from Berrys Creek town (near Leongatha) I went on to do some NDB intercepts at Wonthaggi (WON) and Cowes (CWS) as well. All in all an interesting flight of 2.1 hours.

On the way back from Cowes to Moorabbin I also flew past the west of Tyabb airfield and took this picture of the 35/17 runway.

Tyabb airfield