Immersed myself into some hangar talk at LEIS Binissalem. Correction, LOUD hangar talk in good Spanish tradition.
Good paella, good company and a nice touch to the event in that two veteran local aviators were interviewed and came up with their war stories.
A nice quite old gentleman, talking about his epic crash in a DC6 which could not keep altitude after suffering a runaway engine, even with the three others at full take-off power. The same guy flew ME109’s in the ‘battle of Britain’ movie.
And my friend Pepe from Petra LEPT, pioneer of the trikes on the island, shooting off all kind of anektdotes, including this one from the eighties: A man comes to the field completely convinced he wanted to learn to fly trike. Insisted on paying a large part of the course in cash and go fly right away. Not a word of Spanish. Pepe took him up and after 30 seconds the man started to shout probably the only word he had memorized. “Abajo, abajo” which means “down”. So he was back on the ground 30 seconds later, ran off and that was it.. Where was this guy from? England of course 
Good paella, good company
… and the wine, tasted some pretty good (ok, finished that bottle 2nite) Binissalem Rioja. Now due for yet another visit, wine tasting only of course. None of those gambas thingies 😆
Visited the Speyer Technik Museum – and saw some interesting aircraft and some “spacecraft” – very much worth a visit, and flying into the airport EDRY is extremely convenient to the museum. I can still recall as a kid seeing the F4 used as an airshow aircraft with the USAF Thunderbirds demonstration team – and this one which is painted to be a USN Blue Angel brought back memories. It’s strange when half the aircraft in a museum were new in your lifetime.
We had another day trip to Bembridge, with the double-decker bus to Sandown. Unfortunately Papa someone forgot the dinosaur museum is closed Sundays, so we went to Wildheart Animal Sanctuary next door. We haven’t been since 2022 and they’ve gained two bears and a bamboo dome walk-through lemur enclosure, but prices have doubled (£70 for a family of four).
We walked into Sandown town for lunch at Flanagans. The décor was standard pub, but the food was really good. After we left, Mummy someone said, “Oh no, I actually wanted to try the place next door. That’s why it didn’t match the photos on Google maps.” 
Then a happy afternoon spent on the beach. No issues on the flight either way.
Thank you all for the little trip reports, always nice to read.
Capitaine wrote:
but prices have doubled (£70 for a family of four).
It is crazy how expensive everything got (or at least feels) within just 2 years or so. We feel it especially when we go somewhere as a family (of five).
On Friday afternoon I went Cubin’ meaning I managed to find a slot in the weather when it was decent enough to mess around Selbu lake with the Piper Cub. Of course, at take-off the wind was calm, but 40 minutes later when I came in to land, the wind had picked up, announced as 250° at 10 kt which is not too bad considering that I landed on 27. However, my last few flights were on floatplanes and before that I mostly flew the cub as instructor from the back seat and I was now in the front seat. That led to a few bounces before I focused more and got everything under control.
On Saturday, our SkyWagon was just out of annual so we took it to a new (to me) airfield, Henning. Lovely airstrip slightly uphill so you land one way, take off the other, with a good level of ‘sportsfly’ activity. I trained a few landings there, which is a little challenging since you have kind of a hump a the start of the strip which tends to send you back in the air even though you touched down before. Since we were 2 pilots I managed to take some pictures
All in all a fun little adventure, I’ll probably fly back to Henning in the near future.
Just a bit of maintenance, no flying – I worked out the single most annoying glitch I had: The glide computer switching between ‘vario’ and ‘speed command’ mode whenever it felt like it. The cause was a switch connected to the flaps which also toggled on some vibration. Compunding the issue was that I never knew about this switch in the first place, and, worst of all, it not being a switch in a conventional sense but a current through the whole flap control rod assembly into some kind of bolthead, acting as a stop, closing the loop from there.
It’s the little wire in the lower left corner. The bolt is somewhere below the engine shaft housing in the middle, below the trottle, in the least accessible space.
While I had it open, I cleaned out the dust and also greased all the ball bearings in the rod ends, there is a zillion of these in that plane.
