No Fuel Like An Old Fuel

Submitted by mike on Mon, 2008-04-28 11:42.

Welcome to Scotland - just bring a bike.

The refinery at Grangemouth has a 2 day strike and absolute chaos breaks out - panic buying causes rationing of fuel and on going out for dinner now we have to phone ahead to a garage to ensure they have diesel. We are only allowed to buy it in 10 pound increments in Kelso and 20 pound increments in Coldstream and almost got banned by accidentally putting in 20 pounds and 17 pence with the pounds whirling past faster than a drunken dervish. I am mystified as to what people are doing with all the fuel and do they not normally fill up their tanks - a minimum fuel fillup rather than maximum would be better strategy for queuing and probably for fuel efficiency.

To add insult to injury we are now treated as fuel lepers when we turn up with jerry cans to fuel the microlight and we are fast running out of fuel in our store. The Scottish Government are now shipping in fuel from abroad and the economy is losing 50 million per day as pipelines are closing down because someone suddenly noticed that Grangemouth is the single source of energy supply for pumping oil in from the rigs.

I flew our new microlight for the first time after my check flight. Naturally down to my home - 30 minutes from East Fortune to Lempitlaw at 90mph skimming past the landscape over the clouds. It rained so I didn't tarry to buzz the neighbours but zoomed back northward to land at high speed with no wind to slow me down. The scenario went like this in the clubhouse - one woman watching her hubby landing perfectly and extolling his virtues to the assembled crowd of tea drinkers when Kim excitedly saw her hubbie enter the circuit in their gleaming new plane, come careering into finals far too high and diving at high speed missing the grass runway, ballooning several times, wavering through overcontrolling to finally drop out of the sky and bounce several times on the runway before careering to a stop using the brakes before the fence. I decided to try that one again and managed to demonstrate some great overcontrolling but had less of a bounce - so am going to have some remedial landing lessons as they will be cheaper than a new plane.

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