After Duty Instructor Glenn Turpin's delayed Daily Brief, which gave the weather a chance to decide what it wanted to do, two K21's and a Junior were walked up to the west end due the dead north crosswind. Aided by duty tuggie Peter Field, training flights started under a promising sky. Despite RASP, the Met Office and all the other usual prediction tools indicating a good soarable day, things unfortunately didn't work out that way except for a lucky few. During the morning, flights were relatively short as there wasn't much lift to be easily found amongst all the heavy sink, even under the most promising of clouds.
Promising clouds (Mark Layton)
After an early lunch (not enough members present to carry on through) the EuroFox was brought out and some experienced extended flights but even a 2000ft aerotow couldn't guarantee it being any longer than a winch launch!
More promising clouds (Mark Layton)
Jeff Taberham in 380 was the only private glider pilot and managed 90 mins whilst several others had around the 40 mins mark. New member Paul Thompson, who only completed his First Flight last week returned and got bombarded with training from all sides, both on the ground and in the air. It paid off as he got numerous boxes ticketed off in his training card after a 40 min flight with Glenn.
By about 16:30 everyone had flown, so the gliders were brought home with hangar landing flights except Chris Warnes who managed to climb away to cloudbase and only came down once everything had been packed away.
A strange sort of day with the promising clouds not really delivering what was forecast, but plenty of those present got something out of the day so it was more than worthwhile. - Mark Layton