Author: Blogger

Apart from working, which I seem to do a lot these days the weather has been poor and I missed the opportunity to fly on Thursday, great as it was.
I’ve been working on my trailer and glider getting it ready for the cross country season. This consists of replacing all the bits of tape and wire that were holding various parts together which had been done on the hoof as last year progressed. This seems to be the format for each year I fly.
To do my repairs and maintenance I moved my glider down to a friends house where I plugged in a small greenhouse heater as well as a dehumidifier.
I also placed two data loggers, one in the trailer with heater and dehumidifier and the other in his unheated garage 6 feet away and they record relative humidity, dew point and temperature.
From the results, which are only over a period of 8 days it would seem quite a good idea to do the same at the end of each season.

The main difference, for those who are interested is that the relative humidity, or as I like to call it (the B%*&*&+$ Osmosis in my wings, dammit), is one  average 71.5% in the garage while inside the trailer its 59.9%. The temperature in the garage averaged 3.90 degrees C while the trailer was a balmy 4.89 degrees.
So the conclusion, if there is one, is that it’s wet and damp inside your trailer if left alone. It’s also cold and possibly lonely.
The sharp peaks in the second chart are (I believe) where the dehumidifier turns on and off.

I may keep the logger in the trailer with a control in a shaded area through the summer to see just how much we back the poor things.
 From: My study, warmer and dryer than the horrible view out of the window!

When the Met Office said “low cloud” that meant barely above the trees.  Sufficient for us to derig JPC and get it into the workshop.

I see there’s no blog entries for the previous weekend or Wednesday but there was flying on each of these days clocking up 58 launches and 6:26 flying time

After the worst January on record* February was a lot kinder.  Only 20 launches more than the average for the month but for flying time it was 3 times the average, almost double the best previous time for the month.
The start of our flying year is October so we are almost half way through the “year”.  Given the rubbish winter it’s quite surprising to see the year-to-date stats aren’t too bad.  Number of launches modest but better (just) than 3 other years,  Total flying time is a different story – a new record.
Just to put those numbers into perspective: the first five months of the year account for 27% of launches and only 15% of flying time.

* Comparisons made over 6 years as those are the stats I have readily to hand

Report from Colin:-

Despite early protestations that the ridge wasn’t really working, eleven people managed an average of 43 minutes airtime each off 17 launches, with Ken Reid and I scoring 3 hours between us. Admittedly the the 2200ft launches did help a little, but forgive my skepticism if by any measure I reckon that was a good ridge day.