An overly optimistic forecast of 4 stars with cloud base at over 3200 feet above the airfield resulted in a morning of a lot of low cloud. The weather check flight discovered cloud at 1000 feet so Harvey Hunt and David Osment found themselves doing launch failure practice with Mike Jardine. Mike Bennett decided to have a go in the K8 but reported that cloud base was not much better and no soaring conditions yet. Returning to the airfield with Mike Bennett was Mark Hughes who belonged to the club in the 1980’s but hadn’t been back since about 1995. He flew with Phil Hardwick (Duty BI) in the Puchacz and thoroughly enjoyed his time back with us.
At this point conditions improved and looked more promising so Malcolm Wilton-Jones took a flight in the twin Astir and managed 31 mins so the solo pilots duly lined up to at the launch point.
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| The queue forms. |
Mike Jardine worked through the flying list, next up was Ray Staines.
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| Drop checks releasing under tension. |
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| Ray and Mike getting ready to go. |
The conditions improved with the cloud base slowly rising for a while, Jamie reported 1650 feet but on my first flight a little later I found cloud base had come down to 1500 but as the flight went on it came down to 1350 so not great. Around 1400 conditions improved with cloud base around 2000 feet and if you took off at the right time you could get away for a local soaring flight but it was a bit pot luck with many flights being limited to less than 10 mins.
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| Sharing a thermal with the twin Astir. |
Only 6 flights out of the 34 were more than 30 mins, the best flights were Andy Davey, managing 2 hrs and 11 mins in his Ventus, Malcolm and Roger Spall managed 1 hour, I managed 49 mins in my Open Cirrus and Mike Jardine with David Osment managed 46 mins in a K13.
Many thanks to Mike Bennett, John Allan and John Smith who did all the winching and to Alison Young who drove the retrieve for 90% of the day. Whilst a disappointing day we did all fly and everyone went home happy.
Steve Fletcher
