Finally

After being on the ground for 5 days we are finally flying again!
The good news is, our instructor finished his last students and from now on he's ours (dennis, pieter, arnaud and me)!
If everything goes according to plan with no cancellations or unexpected things happening some people will already be solo at the end of next week.

Something about my flight today:

- flew at 11.30 LT and because of the heat (41°) thermal turbulence was present everywhere.
I praise the person who invented our seatbelts, without them we would be bumping with our head against the ceiling all the time.
The keywords for an afternoon flight are: "try to adapt to everything" but the heat is sooooooo... intentsive it's nearly impossible.
When you come out of the airplane you are dehydrated from top to bottom and drinking water during the flight is not tasty at all, you swollow hot tea without any taste at all and you have to make shure you're not spilling it all around because a "bump in the flightpath"

We did some traffic patterns: you take off, climbout, make a left or right turn to stay parallel to the runway and then you make your descent to land again.
The only problem is: we fly with a "glider".
On final, I cut the power and aim for the numbers with about a descent rate of 500ft/min.
Normally you should be stabilised for the final approach when setting a good pitch & power (=performance).
Parameters checked, descent rate was almost nothing...
Throttle to idle, pulling out the last notch of flaps (which causes a lot of drag).
Then, suddenly, when overflying a golf court, with an updraught & quite a bit of turbulence my head almost bounced against the canopy
Our DA 20 was just climbing with 300ft/min?!! Pitch down to try to correct, the power was already to idle, flaps were fully out and still we were climbing and there's nothing more I could do...the airplane was just climbing/gliding on the hot air...
The only thing you can shout: GO AROUND, full power, flaps back in, call the tower you go around and make another pattern. The best part of this: 5 minutes extra flying time!!
very frustrating when you try to make a good stabilized approach...
BUT not considering the bumps, the flights are supermegafantastic!!

Happy landings!