Xcitor on New Years Day 2008 Tandem Flight

   111km at an average speed of 66km/h

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The flight is a ritual that we do, we fly every New Years day. This flight was two tandem Xcitor flights, Tony and Steve were the pilots with Riaan and Dawie as the co-pilots.  The flight was from Grasslands to The Hartebeesport dam and then onto Brits Airfield. From there wer seperated, i flew off to Roslyn and Steve headed back on the same route he had come from. Well i say i was the Pilot but Riaan did most of the flying from the passenger seat, I just operated the Radio, Instruments and Throttles. I took off and landed the trike too but 98% of the flight was flown by Riaan. The flight was started with a tail wind blowing at low level but as we climbed the wind shear was fairly rough and then we were flying directly into a NW wind of 14 km/h, this dropped our cruise speed to 45 to 49km/h. After crossing the Magalisburg north Ridge we dropped to 5000ft from our 6500ft. By doing this we increased our ground speed to 63km/h and later as we approached Brits it increased to 83km/h. The air was stunningly clear and the flight was stunning. We fly like this because it gives us the eeling of being the oly aircraft in the world airborn. The is no chat on the normaly busy Special rules area, everyone is sill sleeping. We are normaly the only pilots flying, for us it is uch a treat to have a quiet flight. Over the Brits Airfield  we saw the after effects of a party for new year bu no people in site. We then turned for Roslyn and our ground speed increaded to 97km/h at stages. The strange thing was that we were only about 200feet highter than the top of the smoke stacks from some of the industry in the area but the smoke was blowing 180deg in the opposit direction to our flight direction and flying with the wind. The wind at this altitude was indicating a 30km/h speed. Once returning to the field we arrived back at the field together both and both of us did a smal 19.5m/s spiral to bleed off some hight for the approach to landing.

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