Seeing that the Ridge at Parham would be working Rod,Chris, Paul, Carol and myself trailed our gliders down there to have a day of ridge running.
All you need is a 1,000 ft aerotow and then you are away...... some more away than others....read on!
Rod and Paul in their Puchacz managed 2 hours and Carol and I just 1 3/4 hrs. Chris was hoping to do epic things but unfortunately pushed on a little too far and only managed about 20 mins. Not wanting to say who landed out but the figures speak for themselves :-)
All in all a good ridge day with plenty of opportunities to get down and dirty........again some more than others. Still it was a good field we pulled the glider out of even though it meant I had to reverse the Janus Trailer a good way down a narrow winding road in the dark to get back to the main road!
... and we shall have LIFT. Maybe not on a par with the last northerly day but lots of extended flights. Bob B set the benchmark on the first launch of the day in the Vega with 39 minutes. Steve B and I rigged our gliders and Steve was rewarded with almost an hour off 2 launches and I got just over the hour off one launch.
...Yes, as usual superb E team weather!
Whilst cold, it was still )well, very light cross-wind-with-a-hint-of-tail) and sunny so it was very pleasant out on the field. We had two trial lessons both of whom had a great time, all three two-seaters were out as well as the K8 & Vega so thanks to Steve O for helping out when a rating in excess of BI was needed. This enabled us to give quite a lot of flying to deserving club members Steve T, Selvam and Jim McC - good progress all round.
Equally deserving (I have to say that as he's an important E team member!) is Graham, to whom congrats are due for soloing the Puch today for the first time.
Thanks to all who were there making it happen and having a nice day out!
Was a beautiful sunny Autumn or Winter's day depending on your point of view regarding seasonal matters. A light breeze and mostly cloudless sky made the air temp an irrelevancy. Mostly circuits with new member Paolo showing the South American way of doing these things albeit if my attempts to convince him that the local Buzzard population were in fact Andean Condors were unsurprisingly rebuked...
Phil and Ken went soaring, it was a full cat kind of a day.
After the memorable Saturday ridge day a week or so ago Carol and I towed the Janus up to Lleweni Parc with great hopes of having a week flying the ridge. Unfortunately it appears the weather had not seen the forecast because whilst the BBC morning forecast was showing moderate westerlies (ideal for ridge running) we were actually looking out of the cottage window at a definite southerly flow!
As there is only so much staring up at the sky I can do and getting a bit twitchy I took the opportunity to at least have a fly in the Falke and explore the ridge.
Certain parts of the ridge were sort of working and in a few places working well, so well in fact that I managed to convince P1 to turn off the engine and whilst at the controls soared the ridge the 8 miles or so to Ruthin. It wasn't until I turned back that P1 suddenly remembered that this part of the flight was actually not costing me anything as his costs were worked out on engine time not flying time, he duely restarted the engine!
Here is a short video of the flight:
As you can see from the approach the tarmac strip is a bit narrow and it is vital that you do not depart it as the ground either side is very boggy. We were told that if we did roll onto the grass "sanctions would be made" , what ever that means. The closeness of the bales certainly concentrates the mind but still I was quite happy that I did get a chance to soar the ridge even if it was in a Falke :-)
Ok, so it rained a little. Ok, perhaps not 'little' as such - in fact I don't think I've ever seen the roads approaching Shalbourne as flooded as they were on the way up this morning. And ok yes, it was sort of snowing as I arrived at the field and you ideally didn't want to be attempting to get to the top without four-wheel drive.
But as I've tried to point out, a non-flying day is not the same as a non-learning day, and indeed a few minutes of thinking on the ground can be worth more than many hours of non-targeted bumbling around in the air.
And so it was that, after a spot of wheeler-dealing which included rigging Liz's old tent in the clubhouse, James, John and I got on with some training planning. Frequent cups of tea helped stop us freezing as the temperature dropped to 2C but plans were made in time for us to slither down off the field and close up just as it stopped raining.
There's a moral here somewhere... possibly...
