We had another wonderful Arabian meal for breakfast with the firemen at Arar airport, squatting on the carpet with a great array of pita type breads and savoury fillings, accompanied by a small thimble full of sweet Arabian tea- I longed for lots more tea, but just had the one, as we try not to drink before flying- not only our aircraft needs to have the range to reach our next destination, but our bladders as well!

The fire chief put on his number ones and we took a picture of him sitting in the microlight, telling all his staff in a loud jovial voice that he intended to buy three of them; one for him, then two more for each of his wives!

We took off around 1120 hours local time (now three hours ahead of Zulu or Greenwich Mean Time), heading for Qaysumah, some 4.5 hours flying time away.

Our route, like yesterday, is simply following the main international four-lane highway, that also follows the main oil pipeline, so our GPS systems and maps are very much an optional backup!

I was very tired this morning, having been up until 0200 hours updating the website after recovering my lost computer, so asked Richard if he minded me dozing off for a bit. The funny thing was that I dreamed that I was in a microlight flying to Australia (honestly!), at the same time that we hit a particularly feisty thermal that shot us up in the sky, leaving me suddenly waking up, feeling a bit weightless, and realising with a shock that I was living my dream in an unexpected literal way, and taking me a few seconds to relax and realise all was fine, but I didn't doze off again after that!

I have actually found that it is great for me to fly from the back rather than the front, as it reduces all the hassle of changing radio and transponder frequencies. With my heated gloves on, unless the weather is literally icy, my hands seem to cope fine with the slipstream rushing past them.

Our whole flight today was over open desert, cold at first, but warming up, resulting in very turbulent disturbed air from all the thermal activity, keeping us flying low, anything between 200-500 feet, as the air was calmest there.

As we were flying alongside the road, it gave us an opportunity to fly at the same speed as an SUV driver roaring down the road, lost in his own thoughts, to suddenly realise he could see two people waving to him out of the corner of his eye!  After his initial shock we grinned and waved at each other, becoming something of friends via these Ariel gestures.  Half an hour later, after he had pulled ahead of us he stopped for petrol at a lonely roadside garage, and waved furiously at us as we flew over, waving back to him.I wonder what he will be telling his wife this evening- just one of those lovely moments of international communication without a common language!

My flying today was far from good in the very turbulent air, as both my compass and angle of bank indicator have a bit of a lag to them.  This means that, for example, my compass takes a second or two to measure my heading at that moment and tell me.  Likewise with my angle of bank indicator, speaking degrees of angle of bank left or right also lags a bit.
You can imagine, in very lumpy air with us being thrown about a lot, that there is a measure of guesswork needed, with me trying to marry the two bits of information being spoken into my headphones every three seconds, trying to calculate how much opposite bank I need to put on the wing to stop us drifting too close to the Iraq border, just some 30 miles away, running parallel to us.

In very rough conditions, it is actually very difficult to estimate an average direction to stick to, not having the advantage of a sighted person simply watching the angle of the horizon and a pre-selected point near the horizon to aim at.

The result at times was a very relaxed and jovial bearded Richard chuckling away over the intercom, telling me once again that we were going to visit the Iraqi's without a visiting card.

The other factor, as I have mentioned before, is the intrusion of other radio traffic from other aircraft or Air Traffic Control that partly drowns my computer input, and requires me to also listen to the messages, as well as holding a conversation with Richard at times. Any little distraction like this is sufficient for us to be 40-75 degrees off course in the lumpy air before I can start correcting it.To a sighted person, it is easy to visually see the degree of bank correction they are applying, knowing it is sufficient to compensate and correct the heading.  For me, at times I put a level of pressure on the wing to change the angle of bank, but, sometimes, that particular pressure is quite sufficient in still air to correct the turn.  However, in turbulent conditions, my pressure on the bar may have resulted in absolutely no a corrective bank due to equal opposite turbulence hitting the wing at the same moment.  Alternatively, the same turbulence under the opposite wing may have accelerated and over corrected the bank, with both options only becoming apparent to me seconds later, requiring me to again estimate the new correction to input, and estimate when to meet the turn in advance, so I don't allow the aircraft to go beyond my required heading.

It can be very tiring mentally as well as physically, but having one of the best microlight pilots in the world and the past World Microlight Champion pilot chuckling and making suitable derisive remarks into our intercom is strangely reassuring!

We landed here in Qaysuma to be warmly greeted once again by the local airport fire station staff, alerted by our friends at the Arar airport, who very kindly gave us hangar storage and arranged for us to stay in the airport's VIP visitors accommodation, so we didn't need to travel some 12 miles to the nearest hotel.
Eastern hospitality is simply wonderful in every way- gracious, totally genuine and knowing no limits, leaving us high standards to aspire to in our own lives!

Tomorrow we plan to fly to Doha in Qatar, a long flight that will take us into another country once again, as we continue our quest to restore sight to countless blind people in the world today- a staggering 28 million are actually curable, just with money…

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