Meanwhile, south of the border, Wednesday is a flying day – and a quite reasonable looking one at that. I should maybe qualify that by saying we could see good looking cu the north, south, east and west and we started the day sitting in the middle of a blue hole. Whilst rigging his Pilat Justin B asked me if I though a 2 hour flight would be possible and I encouragingly said “yes” but thought “hmm, depends”.
Shortly after midday Bill C failed to immediately return in the K8 so Chris K pulled his Cirrus online, shortly followed by me in the LS3. The ability to scratch and determination to do so was needed but with those, climbs to 3,200′ were possible (Chris K claiming that particular prize). Cloud base was very variable and was down 2,200′ at times and in places. Justin didn’t manage his 2 hours but did do over an hour to go towards his cross country endorsement. Having said a 2 hour was possible I felt obliged to stay airborne for at least that time and that proved to be the longest flight of the day. In total just over 14 hours of flying was clocked up by “the Wednesday boys” (I’ll skip the aka).
St George’s Day
Driving through Hungerford on the way to the club I began to wonder if I’d stumbled on an EDL rally until I realised it was St George’s Day – George Cross flags every where. Hive of activity when I got to the club including the toilets being cleaned. I promised Chris not to let on who did it in case his wife reads the blog.
Then it was time to fit in some flying – the steady wind down the strip promised some great launches. Unfortunately the 1,300′ cloudbase never gave us a chance to find out what might have been possible. It didn’t take long before there was no one else waiting to fly and the hangar was packed as the rain settled in.
Updating my logbook just now I discovered that I clocked up my 5,000th launch – 7 minutes solo in the Puchacz was not exactly a special flight to mark the occasion.
Unnamed Saturday
Or is it? I’m sure it’s got a name, I’ll have to Google that…
Anyway smith shut up about such inconsequential drivel…
The unnamed Saturday was actually quite good, the same airmass as the oh so good Friday giving strong climbs, yes the spreadout made finding a climb close to a lottery or maybe the subject of a future masterclass… But it was good fun!
EDIT Holy Saturday
Good Friday
And “good” it was. I promised cracking launches plus thermals popping and the C team delivered – almost 27 hours off 32 launches. I saw lift of 7 knots (on the averager) and visited cloudbase at 4,500′, maybe others topped those.
Good turnout of private gliders rigged – Nimbus, Cirrus, LS3, LS7, Duo Discus and Jantar. Only 3 on the instructor’s list though and each of them got in over a hour of flying.
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| Great Bedwyn from a check flight |
Longest flight honours (time and distance) went to Pete Smith who visited Northampton South, Chieveley and Calvert Rail Junction to clock up 320km. The sky kept delivering all day – it took Paul P half an hour to hangar fly the Puchaz and Andrew B (yes, he flys as well as fixes gliders) took 40 minutes to hangar fly the K13 (resorting to spin and stall exercises and deliberately flying through lift).