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Wednesday blues?

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The sky looked quite inviting around midday with puffy cumulus permitting short thermalling flights being blown along in a brisk east wind. Enthusiasm waned as the sky turned blue until Bob and Ken H discovered some sky hooks. A small wave bar was discovered over the western ridge which persisted for several hours up to the 2500ft inversion. Residual instability complicated matters, but with judicious use of whatever kind of lift one happened to blunder into it was possible to linger in the more or less permanent patch of lift.

Maybe small beer for some, but it beats stripping down winches:-)

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First day of Autumn

A pleasant start to the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness – even if the blackberries on the airfield had past their best.  There was even some soaring on offer.  Paul B set the target at 22 minutes which an hour later Rob J pipped with his 23 minute flight.  Paul did not take kindly to his soaring crown being taken so back to the K8 to fly for an unbeatable 37 minutes.

While we were clocking up 30 launches Colin B and Ken H were busy working away stripping down the reserve winch.

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Make your mind up

3 days before the official start of Autumn we seem to have different opinions of which season we were in.  James still in Summer mode but Nigel had moved into Autumn.

Making it’s last appearance of the Summer was Bill’s immaculate T21.  Regardless of the time of year you have to wrap up well to fly in it.

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Sunday 20th September

Late in the morning the mist eventually cleared and cloudbase rose enough for flying to commence.

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If you were lucky there was soaring to be had but with all three two seaters, the K8 and 4 private gliders the launch point sometimes got a little busy!

Carol took a flight in Jeremy’s DG202 and then it was Jeremy’s turn to have a go.

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As you can see he seems to have enjoyed the first flight…….nice socks by the way  🙂

Other notable highlights of the day include Andrew Peacock and Jonty both giving me plenty of opportunity to be devious whilst I put them their bronze flying skills tests. I’m pleased to report that they both passed……. so done the pair of you!

Thanks to Nigel for helping out by flying two trial lessons, one of which was a profoundly deaf lady who used a sucker mounted rear view car mirror to be able to see Nigel so that she could lip read whilst in flight!

Thanks also to Paul P and John Douglass for spending so much time driving the winch and special thanks to Bill Cook for kindly taking me up for a flight in his T21, I can definitely see the attraction in flying an open cockpit glider, the view and sounds are simply amazing. If you get a chance to have a fly in his T21 have ago!

Not sure how many launches or who had the longest flight as I didn’t see the log, hopefully someone in the know can enlighten us.

 

Phil