A bright and promising day, with sunny skies and more clouds than promised. Graham had sent his Nimbus on an expedition to Morocco (! more of this later - Graham promises a blog for the trip, flying in the High Atlas Mountains) and so was flying a borrowed ASG29. He went off on task To Bury St Edmunds late morning. Later Phil & Russell took an aerotow in JYR, and Tim & John D went off in KHC.
We had an unexpected visitor just before we started flying. One of Damien Dyer's friends was flying past in a small aircraft en route to a race and had an engine failure. He just managed to make it over our fence safely to land at Shenington - a great relief to both him and us. Damien was flying in formation in his Yellow Cub and landed to see if he could help. They were unable to fix it that day but apparently Colin has come to the rescue and is looking at the carb. A very lucky escape when you consider the terrain & crop either side of Shenington.
It was very blue at times, with a healthy crosswind (it was a karting weekend!), and a day to drink lots of water. Out towards Silverstone it looked much better at the time I took these two photos (around 3pm).
The two seaters were flat out all day as we had plenty of visitors and trainees, plus Paul Armstrong & Tom Burton had come over from Hus Bos to carry out some Instructor renewals with Mike Miles John Whiting & Pete from Bidford. Alistair F and Eric flew their respective K6's, and HLH was flying too. New member Sam Potter and his Dad Martin had their first flights in a glider with Paul Noonan, and soon got stuck in learning all the airfield tasks, while Mary organised our Trial lesson visitors in moving and collecting gliders. Bruno was busy doing cross country endorsement training, and Phil M did some motorgliding with a visitor, while Robin flew G-Mild. The usual suspects helped out with the winch, retrieve and general odd jobs, and Rowan was kept busy again in the tug. At one point we even managed to get rid of all the gliders.......
We flew late and had a good day....as we sat by the bar Phil Hebden launched his balloon from the top hangar and went for another trip!