Dave's Practice Day 2

The weather was a mixed bag today with pretty good conditions along the first leg and part of the second leg into Serbia.  Jerzy was ahead of me and advised that it was getting weaker as you went further south into the Serbian turnpoint so I elected to nick the zone and push north east to the last zone.  With its 28 km cylinder it would give plenty of options to trim the task distance to get back on time.

As I moved north on the third leg out of the blue hole around the second turn I could see the tops of some TCU's along the course line and about 25 km NE of Szeged I ran into a wall of rain.  It looked like it would be possible to go around it to the south, but that might put you into Romanian airspace and it was closed tocday.  I tried to go north, but quickly dropped that idea as I hit 7 kts down on the north side of the cloud and saw more rain and lots of high cloud ahead shading the ground.

Jerzy who was about 20 km ahead of me was able to sneak around the storms, only to find dead air behind.  I stayed airborne for another hour or so to relay for Jerzy while he struggled to climb away, but eventually gravity won.  Up until the point I aborted the task I was averaging 105 km/hr but on a practice day I didn't want to land out in the rain.