Density Altitude
212man,
I've been meaning to contact the Met Office to find out what the conditions were on that day and then do my calculation again. However, I've just been too busy. All I recall was that it was the hottest time of the hottest day of the hottest year since about 1976 and the point is that I didn't even think about density altitude before departure. I'm prepared to bet that numerous other PPLs at the club that day didn't either, but got away with it because they were flying more powerful aeroplanes with much less than a full load.
On my return, I did the density altitude calculation actually working from the Whizz wheel manual. In recounting my tale, I may have probably got the figures wrong, it was a long time ago, but that's beside the point.
In merely pointing out that my figures in the post must be wrong, your post deflected attention away from the point I was trying to make, namely that over the decades that we had cool summers in the UK we were able to get away with igoring density altitude. After all, few private pilots flew anywhere further afield than central France once a year, (and the vast majority never even went that far, and still don't). As I said in my post, a very experienced instructor told me that most UK PPLs and NPPLs have never even heard the term 'density altitude'.
Today, UK summers are much hotter and we need to be every bit as careful as pilots in Arizona or Namibia, but I don't see this happening. That was the reason for my post.
The other lesser point I was making was that a VLA (especially one with a castoring nosewheel) is very susceptible to thermal activity in these conditions. And the way things are going in the instructing business generally, very many instructors who have spent most of their careers so far on relatively heavy, lumpen Pa28s and C152s will be instructing on VLAs before long.
Broomstick.