After a few days of snow, snowmelt and rain the airfield has started to recover and today there was a sky that caught everyone napping (albeit with the Pawnee on Annual service), but Chairman Nick made a tentative start to the grass-cutting season.
Why aren't we flying? (Nick Jones)
In the evening, the regular Condor Racers held a special event, to encourage members who haven’t had much experience with Condor to have a look at what we get up to.
We usually fly Condor tasks on Tuesdays and Sundays at 7pm - tonight we ran a Club 100 (NH2-Knowstone-North Tawton-NH2) in club class gliders.
As an experiment Stewart Henshall streamed his view of the flight using twitch in a browser window, so no need to download or sign into anything - the link simply opened a browser window where you could see the flight and hear all the banter. NH2-KNO-NTA-NH2
There was a good turnout of fliers (13) and CFI Mark was interested to watch and was sitting in Simon Leeson's cockpit via Discord. The Twitch stream had a small technical issue with only Stewart being audible, but he gave a good commentary whilst whizzing in and out of his own cockpit to view other gliders (whilst flying the task).
Nice parking - Stewart and Dan Hender
The weather conditions were set at a very realistic level with big blue holes, cloudbase at 4000ft and some fairly narrow thermals at times. All 13 pilots completed the task, in times that varied between 1hr 5 and 1hr 30, although some did accrue penalties. Simon Leeson was fastest, but beaten on glider handicap by Mike Wilmott.
Classification
There were 4 members watching the Twitch feed, but this was just a test, so in future we will give more notice to watch, and hopefully iron out the slight technical hitch. We also look forward to more pilots joining in on the flight - a great alternative for practising skills when the weather stops the real thing. Thanks to Stewart Henshall for setting up the feed and to all our regulars for taking part. - J&P