Author: Blogger

What a glorious weekend; the gliders were out in force and so were the dandelions and with a high cloud base there was plenty of flying to be had.
Sunday saw John Parker, Tony Chapman, Jon Scott and Justin Butler, all new members as well as the trial lesson Vanessa have some great flying. This with the regular members who turned up, rigged and flew meant there was an alarming lack of gliders on the ground.

Tim kindly test flew the Ka8 and he carefully checked everything on the glider, then checked the parachute. All was fine and we watched the glider being put through its paces. We still have a Ka8 everyone can fly.

Phil and Carol took off to Burdlip then over the Bicester. Sunday and I nursed sun stroke from Saturday.

I hadn’t noticed the sun was quite so strong and even though I drank plenty I just didn’t have a strong enough sunscreen on.
It was lovely to see the Swales make it’s appearance and like the swallows who also appear from nowhere it took to the sky and disappeared for hours.

Quite a nice weekend as it happened.

I suppose it is not very often that we get 3 consecutive days of flying on a bank holiday weekend but this time we did.
The southerly wind started off reasonably light but as soon as the Puchacz was pulled on line it started to increase……..

With a trial lesson booked for 11 am we focused on getting Nigel though his BI acceptance flights, after many cable breaks and other checks these were completed just in time.

As you can see Nigel quickly settled into his new role and promptly took his first victim (sorry punter!) soaring. After a first flight of 8 minutes he then took advantage of the soarable conditions to fly for 20 minutes more.

Despite the wind increasing to around 20 knots it was very smooth with very few gusts and with reasonable thermals some extended flights were achieved, I think Bob managed 30 mins or so.

We only took the Puchacz flying today but it seems JPC wanted to go flying as well!

Thanks to Colin for the photos.

Phil

My task was to The Mynd (a great gliding club on top of a huge mound of Shropshire earth) and back. Off the wire and straight into a building climb so I started the task vertically followed by a reasonable run to the Cotswold edge. Looking ahead I could see it was blue to the north east of my track line but i thought with a slight bend i would be able to follow the Cu but crossing the Severn it was obvious that the fluffy white magic had run out. I though about heading to the Black Mountains, where I had heard on the radio that the cloud base was 6000ft+ but then I remembered the dragons and the £7 toll charge for a retrieve and so I went for a bimble, first to malmesbury  and then to the edge of the fluffy white things in the west country (sea air I figure) at Frome, from then I stormed down the Vale of Pewsey and then went on to see my sailing club which is under stupidly low and complicated airspace at Reading. All told it made for a lazy but enjoyable 300km flight.

The club class at Lasham tasked the same way and with a stern comp director and task setter they had no choice but to press-on. Most got round at horrifically fast speeds so it must have been working in the blue too…

Another Bank Holiday with good weather – the weather system really does seem to have broken down.  I arrived at the airfield at 9:00 to find it had been Bessented – winch and caravan set-up and B1 rigged awaiting it’s master’s return from work.  Lots of fluffy white things in the sky looking like it was probably already working up there.  Turned out it wasn’t as easy to get away as it looked with about a third of the launches just doing circuits.  Even with that miss rate the average flight time was 52 minutes (Jim C’s 4:04 and Alan H’s 4:00 making significant contributions the average).  Over at the Gibbet there were more multi-coloured duvets floating about than I can ever remember seeing there.  More than one pilot returned with tales of running through sink to a tasty looking cloud only to find it occupied by some of these duvets having escaped from the ridge – well that was their excuse for not getting away.  Lots of gliders passing through too.  One failed to pass and arrived downwind and down hill (turbo tucked away).  Guess they do things differently at Lasham.
Peter E was kept busy with winching for the first hour and then flying a TL and a half day course.  I spent over three and a half hours in the back seat.  33 launches, 23 folks flew and clocked up almost 29 hours of flying.