Interesting circuit area.

Springsure is not recommended to practice circuits.

• 1500' AGL hills at the end of the main runway.


• 1000' cliff faces on both the left and right hand side of the circuits.


• No straight in approaches are possible except if arriving from Emerald and a southerly wind is blowing.


• Idiots who build house's at the very end of any airstrip. (Within 15m with the roof just above the runway level.)

Who in their right mind would build a house at the very end of an airstrip. One nasty downdraft and you would have an aircraft in the lounge room. I would hope a court would knock back a claim for 3rd party damages due to the negligence of the owner. Wait for the noise complaints and damage to their TV aerials.

Flying from Springsure to Roma was rough with Thermals bouncing me around everywhere. I could not out climb them on several occasions with some downdrafts causing me to lose almost 1000' per minute. Biggest updraft caused me to gain almost 1500' in just over a minute. The hills of the Cannavaion Gourge national park can create some pretty nasty turbulence.

Queenslanders do not have the right to bag Victorian weather with Roma being just 3 degrees this afternoon. It was nice and sunny though.

And now for something completely different.

Now that looks strange, It's green. I have spent the last couple of days working between Monkira and South Galway stations in the channel country. The differance of just a hours flying is amazing.

I flew from Windorah to Emerald taking just under 4 (flying) hours to get across the 1000 kilometers. Encountered my first real tail wind of the trip just outside of Blackall (yes the saying is true... Bugger all in Blackall) and I was getting an extra 30 knots ground speed for quite a while. A few hundred feet of differance in altitude added almost 15 knots. If I had driven it would have taking at least 13 hours due to the state of the roads. Much better than sitting in the drivers seat getting a very sore back from the roads.

Air travel out here makes a huge differance. It is over a five hour drive from Windorah to Charlieville but only one and half hours in the slow jab. Getting rid of the corners and detours cuts at least a third off the trip.

I Had my first airbourne encounter with a Wedge tail eagle at 4900' about 30 miles from Emerald. Still don't know who was more surprised. There seems to be a common theme to any Australian travel. Road kill.

I am heading down to Springsure in the morning, ERSA makes special mention of avoiding hills around the airstrip so that may be interesting. Hodgson downs had no mention of the dog leg final approach so mmmmm.

Mud and Dust

Muddy shoes one day and red dust the next.

I spent the weekend in Melbourne after jumping on a 'commercial' flight. It was nice to see the house starting to look like the real thing and not just a empty shell. It did feel a bit strange scraping the mud of my shoes instead of the dust and stones inside of my boots.

I returned to Mount 'Rip off' Isa yesterday and flew out to Hillside this morning. You don't realise how busy the air traffic is in northern Australia until till you try and take off at 08:00. There were at least 15 other aircraft waiting for their opportunity to back track down the runway.

Spent a few hours talking to the owner about his 'proposed' system and then flew into Cloncurry for fuel. I timed things really well again and got mixed up the 'knock off' mine flights as I was coming into land. I Ended up waiting for 45 mins for fuel as the refueller was busy serving the bigger boys (read $$$). I managed to time the flight from Cloncurry to Boulia perfectly and touched down exactly 15 mins before the official sunset.

I am head out to Monkira in the morning to spend a day checking over the system and will then Head to IOR on Friday. I am aiming to be back in Melbourne in about 10 days time.