weekend update

Saturday

After an extremely efficient and quick opening ceremony the competition started with the Spitfire task. The aim was to fly around the outline of a spitfire spotting photos and also the flying at declared groundspeeds and also as fast and slow as possible. This was a fairly straightforward task and did not cause any surprises. If you look the scores for this task but be careful to check you have the latest ones, there have been many revisions! Saturday evening’s briefing was about two tasks the following day, one to get to Sutton Meadows in Cambridgeshire and one to return.

Sunday,

This promised to be a tough day with a lot of flying and probably a high number of points to be lost. The task over to Sutton consisted of a track line to follow with 3 ground speed declaration gates which pilots had to arrive at on their nominated times. Then pilots had to fly a track line which took them around the Cambridgeshire countryside, upon arriving at Sutton Meadows we then had to complete a short landing over a tape. task briefing sheet This task proved to be good fun with 10 photos to spot and a fairly high workload followed by the remainder of the flight into Sutton. Again Sutton Meadows proved to be excellent hosts and after a short rest and lunch the planning for ‘the pipeline’ task started. This was a sequential navigation task which really proved to be tricky, the problem with sequential navigation is that miss one gate and the consequences are dire especially when there was a groundspeed score attached to it!

There were 12 photos in all for this task and as well as marking track lines this was a high workload task. Fo r some pilots in the slower machines this took almost 3 hours so combined with the mornings task it was clear to see why there were some tired faces around after the days flying. At this stage of the week after only two days the pilots had completed 6-7 hours flying and already scores were looking promising for the British team pilots, In WL1 – single seat flex wing Richard has flown consistently well to gain a small lead of the leading Czech pilot with myself and David Hadley in the top six. In WL2 Paul Welsh (AL1 refugee) who only sat in his aircraft for the first time last week) is in 2^nd with Rob snapping at his heels, Frank Hodgson is also in the top 6. In AL2 David Broom is also proving that a last minute change of class and aircraft is not an issue and is well placed. With such consistent flying the team prize scoring is looking promising also.