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What a great day!
Despite an almost promising sky it was not really a great day for flying XC so most of us made do by staying within easy reach of the airfield but not Ken Reid who proved us right by landing the K8 at Alton Barnes! Luckily Jim and Chris B were on hand to go and retrieve him…..by the way anyone seen the K8 trailer board?

Whilst sharing a thermal with Chris K in his Cirrus I took this video on my phone as Paul gallantly tried to keep up with him 🙂

Finally congratulations go to Jon Garner who after passing his bronze theory test the other week successfully flew the flight tests today and has now completed his bronze badge so just needs to get his XC endorsement……….well done Jon.

Phil

Sunny day with a light southerly and some pretty clouds but the only person able to manage more than 13 minutes was Ken R with 58 minutes of scrapping with the K8.  Busy day for the CFI with more instructor checks and flying both his gliders.  Thanks are due to Rob J and the Richards (G and D) for winching and enabling us to clock up 36 launches.

North wind and enough of it to hold the promise of ridge flying but the thermals messed that up.  And what thermals – small and rough.  Climbs to 2,900′ in the morning but only to 2,500′ later in the day.  Vistor from Talgarth with his Ventus joined the “Wednesday boys” and enjoyed one (of 6) of the hour plus flights.  Trevor G did his usual – drive the winch, rig later than everyone else and take the longest flight (3 hours on this occassion).  Another dozen half hour plus flights helped bring the days total flying to 19 hours of f32 launches.

Well, I wasn’t on duty today, and so it didn’t rain. Note that wasn’t me who set up the rota that put E team on Bank Holiday Monday, a combination pretty well guaranteed to ruin the weather! Today I was there in my capacity as P2 doing instructor renewals flying with the Boss whose day it was. As indeed was Professor Dann. We duly started the day with cable breaks on the grounds that it didn’t matter that the low cloud hadn’t yet burnt off; this had the excellent effect of making a weak sun come out. There then ensued a cat-and-mouse game between CFI and instructor-under-renewal to see who could catch the other out. The CFI will ALWAYS win this game for a number of reasons. Firstly, he is the boss, very close to God/gods and always right. Secondly, he can always claim that any error you pick up was Bloggs and well done for spotting it (no, really, it was…). Thirdly, he can pull the bung on you just before you were going to pull the bung on him. Fourthly, he is the boss, see point 1. If this were not the case, then how would he manage to put a ‘sucker’s thermal’ just where we were about to enter the circuit – which was drifting us away from the site at around the same rate as we were climbing. And coming and going to try to tempt you to centre downwind just a little further… We did in the end manage to soar away high enough to complete the briefed exercises but it was a marathon scrape! So both I and Richard were duly renewed and can continue to terrorise the rest of you; but the real achievement of the day goes to Jon who passed his Bronze paper with flying colours. Well done Jon!