Shadow Migration

Having finally found a hangar only 40mins drive from home, I flew my CFM ‘Shadow’ microlight from Manapouri down to a farm strip at Otautau.

After pre-flight checks and fuelling up at Fiordland Aero Club’s hangar, I took off and headed south-east. En-route flying conditions were very pleasant with a 10 knot easterly wind @ 2000 ft. Some low cloud in the valleys, but always a clear path towards Otautau. 

Since it was a lovely morning, I flew over Lake Manapouri, around the Monowai basin and wombled through the Twinlaw  hills, before descending to the farmland. At cruise speed, I covered 107km in an hour’s flight. 

The farm strip at Otautau is only 280m long, so first I did a low pass to check it out. Nearly calm at ground level. My landing was pretty average, but the Shadow pulled up with 100m to spare. I’ll need to practice accurate approaches.

Video, sound and GPS data was recorded on a Sony HDR-AS200V action camera.

This camera has WiFi, so I could remotely control the camera settings, and Start/Stop filming, with the live-view app on my iPhone.

The removeable Li-ion battery easily coped with more than an hour of Full HD video recording, with both the WiFi and GPS running.

A few days later, I edited the video using Garmin “VIRB Edit”. This free software allowed me to overlay the camera’s GPS track, speed, course, distance, etc onto the video clip.