Working down on the farm

We went down to the farm yesterday to say hello to Hedy, and to do a bit of maintenance work.

The farmer was at work there too, much to the delight of the local gulls.

There’s a tractor in there somewhere!

We did fly this summer

but not that much. The weather was sometimes flyable at the same time as we were available to fly though often that was just scratching a short local flight under grey cloud. Hedy only managed two landings away from base airfield. One was a flight to the museum at Stowe Maries Great War Aerodrome, where we sampled their marvellous home-made cake. The other was to a fly-in event at Rougham aerodrome.

Hedy takes off

Getting airborne again

After all those lockdowns and social distancing and other such we now have the freedom, the aeroplane and (sort-of) the weather. This week has seen Hedy taking to the skies with one or other of our little group in charge. All I can say is that she’s a delight to fly. My apologies to the good people of Great Leighs if they were disturbed by us having fun in the sky near them, but we were never actually directly overhead and we were high enough to be safe (and, I hope, not disturbing).

Here’s a nice photo taken at the end of a good day’s flying

Picnic finished, preparing to put Hedy away for the night

Who’s Hedy?

Hedy Lamarr was a famous film star, film producer and inventor.

Our Hedy is Miz Hedy the Thruster T600T, G-MZHD. After losing our old favourite Thruster TST to a forced landing (no injuries to the humans) we decided to buy a replacement rather than carry out the extensive repairs that would be required.

After a few weeks searching the adverts and hunting down the best we could find, we fell upon an early T600T and used the remaining insurance funds to pay the Thruster expert at Volair Aviation to clean her up to a standard we could be proud of and return her to full airworthiness.

Then The Lockdown struck – she was still half way across the country awaiting the opportunity to be delivered. We were all feeling frustrated.

Then an opportunity arose for the delivery pilot to fly her to us. She’s still stuck in the hangar until the Stay at Home rule is lifted, but at least she’s there waiting for us.