Freesteel Blog » Isle of Wight weekend tour

Isle of Wight weekend tour

Wednesday, October 31st, 2018 at 12:24 pm Written by:

A quick weekend to take advantage of Becka’s trip to Southampton University to work as an examiner. Unfortunately the university library was card controlled, so I hung out in the Burgess Road Public Library skimming through a tourist book about the Isle of Wight (containing no useful information) and then reading part of a Douglas Adams book.

We drove over on the ferry on Friday afternoon to stay with an old hang-gliding buddy, who is now the last hangie on the island. This, down from a time when, during the 1980s and 1990s, one of the largest hang-glider manufactures in the world was in operation.

It was too windy for that game, and blowing from the north, so we took our kayaks, went out of Freshwater Bay and paddled to The Needles.

It seemed too windy and scary to get out to the far needle, so we got back and gave our friend a trip round the bay, then walked up to the battery to see the stunning white cliffs from another angle. It was cold and windy.

On Sunday we took the cycle trail from Newport to Sandown, emptied all our tuppences into a machine, and cycled back again, pumping up the tyres every couple miles due to a slow puncture.

I’ve been doing my best to get through the book Tailless Aircraft in theory and practice that I nicked from my friend’s bookshelf on the way out. More on this later. The mathematics in it feels a bit shoddy, which might be why I’ve never got through such engineering books before. Foundational assumptions, such as the optimality of the elliptical lift distribution, are stated in passing because the practitioners have so internalized them they don’t even notice. It’s as basic to the equations as the conventions of using (x,y,z) for the axes and t for time. Also, these engineering guys will divide anything by anything just to get a dimensionless constant.

Then on Monday I put it in practice by driving over to Treak Hill in the peak district and bombing out to the bottom landing field, while everyone else had a lovely time flying all round Mam Tour. (The airforce glider is a two person glider that also went down, because it’s quite heavy. I packed it up while the pilot went up for a proper fly.)

Maybe tomorrow.

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