Today, 1st
of May, was blue, very blue, But the forecast thermal activity was
very positive. I was hoping, perhaps some time this year, to attempt a
300 k flight. Today, being blue seemed to have too many constraints for
that, and I thought I might try a little bimble around the back yard and assess
my ability in dealing with blue thermals, if there were to be any! Accordingly I launched at 1200 and was swept up to 4000 ft by a single stonking
updraught. I was surprised and pleased. Before launching I had
somewhat optimistically put ‘President’s Triangle’ in the Cross Country Book,
just to justify my launch on such a day!
Now at 4000
ft, I was facing a personal challenge. I had attempted on a number
of occasions to fly this same task in company with my son, based in Hong Kong,
on Condor, the Gliding Simulator software, where we can fly together [and where
we find we can also chat together using SKYPE] and had only once previously got
past TP1 which is NS [Northampton South]. So off upwind I plunged,
knowing that I had an awful lot of potential at that height for getting things
wrong, vis-à-vis finding and dealing with thermals, and still not getting me
into too much trouble getting back to the airfield. And I did just that,
for the next hour, gradually coming to the conclusion that the day was such that
I was not going to be out of luck. NS was upwind at this point so,
in a way, I had it easy because when I met a thermal the chances were that I
was going to meet its companion, if it was lined up in the energy street, and
so it turned out. Turning NS I had height in hand. Now for a run to
BIC [Bicester] which had some tail wind in it.
Much good it
did me. By the time I got to Silverstone, I was down to 1800.
It was at
this point when I mentally reviewed my past landouts, and went through my checklist
[pity I hadn’t done it before I took off] and I realised that I had no money
[there may have been coins but I couldn’t get into my trouser side
pockets] and no phone. Silverstone as a landout has a certain
mystique. One hears stories. There was nothing happening on the
race circuit. But I tried to imagine meeting a uniformed attendant and
saying, ‘sorry about this, is there a phone box and can I borrow a florin’.
I had been
spoiled, up to this point, with up to 8 knots of lift at
times. But need and fear drove me in to a ‘whatever
comes along will do ‘mode. So I did. And they did. Mother
Nature smiled on me. It’s difficult to convey the feelings of
achievement on seeing that the next goal, which I had fondled imagined would be
on the horizon, was in fact that splodge of green under the nose. I went
round Bicester at 3000 again.
Now, pretty
well dead into wind back to EDG.Very tempted by Upper Heyford.It’s been a big friend in the past. But I think I might have outgrown it.
Certainly on a day like this. …………………………. But another saving thermal!!
How can EDG be so difficult to see from that direction? Only the
position of Banbury and the good old GPS kept me safe.
If all the
foregoing aren’t enough to warn you about the dangers of ignoring your training
and briefings, hear this. I cannot prove I did it. I set up
the GPS and logger in the cockpit on rigging, ran the test, and then, not
wanting to be faced with a readout of nothing happening, because the AVGAS
tanker pulled into the airfield as I sat at the launch point and prevented
launching, I switched OFF the logger. You’ve guessed the
rest. No logger.
Eric (ntd)