Saturday 1st September 2012

The forecast leading up to Saturday was looking very good. The RASP soaring forecast was for strong convection over a long period of the day. Rushing up to the airfield with thoughts of flying the Jantar for 4, 5 maybe 6 hours today I was interested to see that other pilots had got the message and there was a flurry of activity as pilots rigged ( assembled )  their aircraft, and others were rushing about preparing the club and aircraft.

At this point there were a couple of negatives. The weather was not co-operating, the cloud cover was complete ( 8/8 in aviation terms ) and very low. Due to an administrative oversight there was no duty instructor. What to do?

Enter a knight in shining armour in the shape of Wednesday instructor Bob Pirie who very graciously agreed to supervise the airfield which meant reducing his plans to fly solo in his very beautiful ASW20. And suddenly, the weather also started to play ball and within about 15 minutes the cloud cover rolled away. So by 11am it was game on.

There was a lot of visitors to the airfield today. Duty BI Sean was tied up with a One Day Course student so I agreed to help out with the other visitors.

So what happened? Well there was lots of flying activity. The ASW20, Fokka 5, Astir CS and K8 all made valiant soaring efforts. The club 2 seaters including the Bocian were kept busy. The soaring was ultimately a little disappointing. Thermals to 1800 feet interrupted several times by parcels of sea air moving through the area made the day challenging but most pilots including several of the 2 seater flights managed a little soaring. 

Yours truly and 3 of our visitors Megan, Finley and Theo Jenkins share a moment between flights.

And did I fly the Jantar for 5 hours? Well no. I did manage to get the fuselage out of the trailer before commencing 2 seater flying with the visitors. I did 10 flights in the 2 seater with our visitors and the chance to introduce our sport to so many people and practice soaring the difficult conditions all day made today a satisfying second best.

Steve