Ending up this blog

It's about time to end this blog. It was fun doing this project and I hope it will be even more fun to use the machine. Future developments can be followed where they belong: Kiwi Air

Thank you for your attention.

Some videos!

Te Aroha!

The Mercer airfield turned out to be too short. It's a mere 600 meters and that's just too short without any wind.

During one of the many trips Tony makes through the country to visit customers, he asked a customer if he knew any long fields in the neighbourhood. The guy said there was an old airfield somewhere in Te Aroha. Tony's next appointment was in Te Aroha, so he asked the ladies if they knew where the tourist information center was. Being ladies, they of course wanted to know what information he was after, so he told them he wanted to speak to the owner to see if we could possibly use the field to tow up paragliders. The lady then replied: "You're talking to the owner".

And that's the story on how we got our new field. 830 meters long, direction 116(ESE)/296(WNW). The field direction means we'll have cross wind most of the times, but the past couple of weekends have shown that's not a big problem.

View Larger Map

Last Friday (10/08/2009) we also had an appointment at the Thames Council to see if we could use the Thames Airfield (1000 meters long). The result of that meeting is that we'll organize a day where all users of the airfield (flight school, skydivers, sailplanes) can see and experience (through tandem) how we operate. If everybody agrees we're not in the way of other operations we can go there as well. That field is in direction 158(SSE)/338(NNW), which is the perfect direction for that area.

Last Saturday we went towing at the Te Aroha field and it was an awesome day. Progress was very, very slow (only 10 tows on that day), but the flight results were crazy! Remember it is winter here, and all other sites were either blown out or wrong direction!

There was a big cloudstreet right over the field. Xen flew ~27 km (flight not yet on Leonardo) and Alex flew ~30 km! Crazy distances for winter in NZ!

See Flight Results (or open in Google Earth).

Houston, we may have a field!

Today we (me and Tony) went on a little tikitour to another possible winch field. It's a beautiful airstrip of 725 meter in WSW/ENE direction and a strip of 330 meters at 90 degrees in NNW/SSE direction. Prevailing wind here is WSW or ENE, so would be perfect. This field is a private airstrip that shouldn't be too busy and is very well kept.


View Larger Map

Unfortunately, the guy owning the place was not there. Even though the hangar (with about 4 planes) was open, the 4 wheeler on the paddock and the cars all unlocked no sign of the owner. We left a note with our names and phone numbers and went to the neighbors to see if they had a contact number of a name. We've got a name, Mr. Ward, just no phone number yet.

This airstrip is 3.5 km due east from the Mercer dropzone, so if we want to use this field we'll have to talk to that dropzone too so they know what we're up to. We were close anyway, so off we went!


View Larger Map

When we mentioned we were paragliders looking for a field to tow and were wondering if they knew the guy owning the strip at Kelly Rd we got an interesting answer: "Why would you want to tow there? Just come tow here!". Wow! That was unexpected! Wouldn't that conflict with the skydiving operation? "Nothing that good communication can't solve!". We talked to the regular airplane pilot, the SFO (Safety Officer) and the owner of the Mercer drop zone and they were all very enthusiastic about the opportunity to attract more people to the airfield and have more aviation activity on the field! Their runway is 1300 meters long (although in Google Earth you can only see 650 meters; in NASA worldwind you can see it all) and we can use the same runway they use for their planes. All we have to do is stop operation for about 15 minutes when they fly and drop a load of skydivers.
The only downside of this airstrip is the direction... 112 degrees, meaning good for E/SE or W/NW, which are directions that don't occur so much in that area. The plane pilot said that the wind is 60 degrees or more cross 90% of the time...

We're going for a trial day the next weekend the weather is good for towing. We'll know more about the weekend weather next Wednesday, so help us hope for good weather!

UPDATE: The owner of the Kelly Rd. airstrip called us and is very open to the idea of us winching on his field occasionally. He said we can't use it on a regular basis because it's a free airfield, meaning that planes can just come in and land (or low pass) whenever they feel like it. We can use it occasionally by issuing a NOTAM. He also told us he constructed the 730 meter (which he will be extending to 1200 meter next year) airstrip in 1999, after studying 30 years of meteorological data on prevailing winds in that area. Opposed to the Mercer airfield the wind will be straight on the field for 90% of the time here...

A very succesful Sunday trip one might say!

Winch for start, Winch for start, can you read me?

Yep, you need good communication on a paragliding winch field, so I bought a 5 Watt CB unit and mounted that on the winch:

First I mounted the radio bracket and the handpiece holder:


Next thing to do was open up the cable tree. Whoever had the tape when they first taped it was having a real good day... Man, I think I took off over a kilometer of tape!


After putting the cable in and hooking it up to continuous +12:


And ground:


And here's the final result:


I hope this little modification will get approval from the Dutch inventors!?


Here are some more pictures from our last day winching:

Transformers, rainbows in da skys!



The Quad for line retrieval:


And our regular Line Drivers:


PS. The problem with the images was Google Chrome... Internet Exploder works, yak!

Fly, fly, fly, and fly some more!!!

I haven't been posting a while, and that's really because I spent all my free time flying. Now if you don't think that's a good reason you are probably not a pilot!

Anyway, that first day of towing we did 4 tows and then the diff locked up. We had to turn around the winch because the wind changed 180 degrees. Because we still had 2 lines out on the field I winched them in, at quite high RPM's to get the drogue chutes to get airborne and get a bit of tension on the line. I think that's why the diff locked. Henry & Erik think at high RPM's the transmission sucks the oil from the diff and the diff throws any remaining oil off the spider gears because it it turning so fast. Then the diff runs dry and welds itself together. Even I, a total N00b on mechanics and car engines, can picture and understand this, so I think it must be true...

With the confidence and trust of the helpdesk in the Netherlands I started to replace the transmission. First I took off the transmission of the engine I had bought last year (when I still wanted to make the winch myself) and cleaned it all. The next day Tony came and helped me take the transmission of the winch and put the "new" one on. After that was done (a lot of swearing, sweating and fucking around later) I drove the winch to my local mechanics shop to have them check all the wiring and fill it with oil. We overfilled it a bit and started... It worked! I was a little bit proud of myself at that moment! ;o)

Anyway, the next flyable day we went to the field and did 30 tows. Keeping the RPM's low when retrieving the lines of course. We had nil-wind conditions all day and towed up acro wings, beginners and tandems. At the end of the day we had a cable break because the line went over the other line (somebody fucked up driving the lines out) so I had to put them together again. The tool that came with the winch works exactly the other way as I'm used to, and I just couldn't figure it out... We tried several different things but every time we towed the lines came apart again. Finally we gave up and just made two intertwined loops. That worked too... By that time it was almost pitch black, but still a line out and 2 guys eager to fly tandem so, what the heck! By that time there was a bit of wind and in one tow we got the tandem to about 500 meter! Nice!

The next weekend we scouted around for fields, but man, it's difficult finding a long field closer to Auckland. With nil wind 500 meter is really short, so we really want a field of 700 or more meters. The field we have now is 1100 meters long (and we can even go a bit further than that) but it's a long drive; exactly 150 km (2 hours). We scouted around for airstrips but believe it or not, airstrips are almost never longer than 400 meters! Anyway, we'll keep on scouting and trying... There's an awesome military airfield that they are talking about closing... Definitely something we'll be following closely! Imagine that, 2 km or runway in the prevailing wind direction, and if the wind is off just take the other runways!

The Monday after that was Auckland Anniversary Day, a free day in NZ so, off to the winch field again! Again nil-wind, but nice big thermals! I flew tandem with an ex-colleague of mine (Lucas from EmbeddedFusion) and we released at around 300 meter, straight into a small thermal. Quite hard to center at first, but it kept on going. Above 500 meters it became bigger and bigger and we ended up at 1100 meters where I had to stop because by that time Lucas' balls were blue. He couldn't get into the harness correctly. I tried helping him, but the harness was just too small... Here are some pictures of the surroundings of the airfield (from about 1000 mtr) looking SW:

And another one looking S towards Matamata:


Later that afternoon we finally got a bit of wind to play with. With 15 km/h wind and 1000 meter line the acro wings got to 600 meter, the tandem got to about 700 meter and solo LTF 1/2 gliders got to 800 meter! Yeeeeeehaaaaaa!
Here's the view from the line:

And the view after release back to takeoff:

Eva shot some footage of me flying acro, but I'm too ashamed to show it... You can really see I haven't had decent practice possibilities. Everything is floppy and messy... Hopefully that will get better again soon!

With that height and the thermal flying earlier in the day the field and the winch have really proven themselves to the Kiwi's. Everybody that comes along and flies goes home with a big smile on their face!

Now all we need is experience so that the field runs a bit more efficient... The coming weeks I will spend on writing procedures and organizing team days where we can all practice and learn how to tow, how to be a startleader, how to communicate over the radio, etc. etc.

The coming weekend I will spend fixing the green hub (it keeps popping off the axle when I drive around towing the winch) and hopefully Erik's firmware fix will work (there's a small problem with the force gauge). We'll probably scout around again and have a look at the Parakai airfield.

I'll keep posting! Promised! ;o)

Repair completed

After one and a half days of work and supervision from the Netherlands, Michel and Tony managed to replace the transmission unit. We had the impression that there were moments of slight irritation... But it could well be that it was caused by the quality of the video connection.





From now Michel is a graduated mechanical engineer, specialism: winch engineering. "Every disadvantage has it advantage" (quote from the famous Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff). In this short time Michel has learned a lot about the winch and he will be able to fix all future problems.



After the job was done we received a nice remark from Tony via MSN: "Yes, we got it all finished and running yesterday in the end. It took until nearly 6.00 o'clock!. Refilled the transmission and had it all running. Still the covers etc . Man every time I look at it I admire the engineering and thought and high level of finish - a real professional job by you guys!".

In a few days towing can start again and the results will be posted on this blog.