It had been awhile since I dropped in on my favorite gravel bar. Being late December and mid-afternoon, the sun was low on the western horizon. This would have been right in my eyes on the normal westerly landing direction down-river. Today featured calm winds so I go to fly the more fun, more challenging dogleg approach. The gravel bar is quite large and landing/takeoff performance is almost never critical.

Landing




Taking off with a practice rudder turn up river for proficiency.

Jughead, to get the videos to post just use the numbers at the end in between the brackets.

Thats some good clean fun!

Jughead,

A very nice apparent brisk walk rate of closure to the desired touchdown spot and a very nice rudder turn in low ground effect on takeoff. As you know the rudder turn in low ground effect could have been used getting into the very beginning of the landing zone, but one must be very sure that the LZ is around the corner.

Contact

Nice flying and scenery!

There are some big "Magnetos" behind that firewall!

contactflying wrote:Jughead,

A very nice apparent brisk walk rate of closure to the desired touchdown spot and a very nice rudder turn in low ground effect on takeoff. As you know the rudder turn in low ground effect could have been used getting into the very beginning of the landing zone, but one must be very sure that the LZ is around the corner.

Contact

Contact,

By staying high and to the outside of the turn, the rudder turn isn't really necessary there. Trading altitude all the way down, preserving energy and never really needing more than 30 degrees of bank. No on the way out through the dogleg (opposite direction) I definitely use a rudder turn as you can see in some of my older videos here.

Good job all around.

Nice clean technique and a great place to land. Challenging but not dangerous if you do everything right.