Author: Blogger

All I can say is thank goodness for Andy Murray and Peter E.  Without Peter E we wouldn’t have been able to fly everyone who needed the services of an instructor and without the big tennis match we might have been even busier.  In the first couple of hours only the patient and determined (and maybe a little bit lucky) achieved more than a circuit.  Having a hot ship (such as, say, a nicely polished LS7) didn’t help.
Over the day about a third of the launches enjoyed a soaring flight with Rod H & Paul P taking longest flight honours in EUF of over 4 hours.  Half a dozen folks enjoyed their first taste of gliding.  Selvan converted to the K8 and Alan H got his silver distance in the club Vega with a trip to Bicester.
Many thanks to the few members who went above and beyond to get the toys out, kept us flying and put the toys away (oh, and fix the lights on the Vega trailer before heading off on an unexpected retrieve).  

Here’s what ours looks like:

and here’s the view out of the window:

and here’s a barogram

maybe it was to do with these:

Pity I was all by myself

Arriving fashionably late on the airfield on Wednesday I was pleasantly surprised to see that the midweek crew almost had the field set up and HAX trailer was parked at in the rigging area. ‘Just as well you got started early’ says I ‘cos it’ll all be over by one o’ clock’. HAX was hastily rigged and by 11 o’clock the entire club fleet was on the line, by which time the sky looked like this:

By midday Selvam and I were looking down at a deserted launch point.

By half past twelve the sky was beginning to look like this:

at which point the five gliders that had been soaring for an hour or so all landed for lunch. By this time the afternoon shift had arrived, so Stephen and I spent the rest of the day inflicting some serious ‘bung pulling’.

There may be a moral here somewhere….

This year hasn’t exactly been great for gliding, especially when one is busy at work and only get the weekends at best to utilise for gliding.

Usually my glider repairs are undertaken on the winter months when it’s cold and nasty. Recently it’s been cold and nasty so over the last few weeks I decided to undertake some remedial repairs and improvements to the belly and wingtips of my LS7.
This is what happened:

First you take one of these:

In this particular case I was lucky to have an Andy Brind brain which I picked.
He told me what I should do with this:

The problem was the wing tips were a little tatty and the belly of the fuselage was cracked through the gel coat and had a few score marks where it had landed in the odd flinty field or 17 times….

Next thanks to Andy ‘The Brain’ I ended up with a lot of advice and one of these:

Next you take a pair of these:

With a lot of this:

As well as this:

Eventually you end up with this:

Which I found upsetting and rather worrying.

At this point you need a little luck and the help of the Spray Fairy, they’re quite shy creatures, can you see the little fellow?

I managed to coax him in with a little help from:

Low and behold:

I trapping him with one of these:

And he weaved his magic:

And I ended up with:

Now all I have to do is polish it back and go fly!

Thanks Andy and Phil!