Friday 16th April 2021
Posted: 19/04/2021 21:08
Friday 16th. The high pressure remained in charge and after some early morning fog dispersed at Topcliffe, a sunny day resulted with Cumulus developing by mid/late morning, with a number of cross countries flown from the 24 ATs off runway 20 into a light S/ly/SSE/ly. Rob Bailey, obviously not satisfied with his speed around the 320 km task flown on Thursday, repeated the visits to Beverley/Carlton/Goole NE/Tontine and posted a handicapped speed of 85 kph, some 10 kph faster than his speed on Thursday. John Ellis in his DG800 and Andrew Cluskey in his Shark both flew the same 260 km task, with TPs at Beverley/Carlton/Market Weighton with only 0.1kph between them on handicapped speed, while Andy Wright in his Nimbus 3 flew a slightly different task, Beverley/Sutton Bank/Market Weighton, covering the 232 km at the same speed as John and Andrew flew their task. With plenty of lift still around, John continued flying and covered 400 OLC kms in his flight of 4:45, the longest of the day. With the 2nd F1 Grand Prix at Imola having a practice day on Friday, Dave Latimer decided to emulate the 3 sessions of qualifying by flying the 100.2 km Pocklington/Rufforth task 3 times in succession. Like Lewis Hamilton in his Mercedes, Dave improved his times over the 3 circuits, urging his Ventus 3M to handicapped speeds of 90.2, 94.7 and 95.6 kph. Nick Gaunt in his LS7 had a rather eventful flight, starting with a low (<500') save following releasing from tow at 800' into a nonexistent thermal. Things improved considerably after that as Nick flew around Carlton/Market Weighton/Ripon, some 251 km, enjoying some convergence lift between Carlton and Market Weighton and finally having a very close airprox with a Peregrine Falcon, as Nick commented in his report, separated by a feather's length. Cloud base was of the order of 5,000' asl. this being acheived by Rob Bailey, John Ellis, Nick Gaunt, Dave McKinney in his ASW28 and Sue Ahearne in Astir DPO. The day's 20 flights of over 30 minutes included 16 of over an hour, the latter achieved by a number of pilots in club gliders including Andy Tyas in Astir DPO, Chris Knapp in the Discus, Sue Aherne in the Discus, John Carter and Phil Lazenby in K21 KLW and Bruce Grain and Mark Bahn in the DG500.
This blog describes a snippet of life at the Yorkshire Gliding Club. Why not take a flight and try it yourself, or we can teach you to fly as a full club member.