Easter weekend review

Recently the dominating high pressure has bought us calm blue days with low inversions and poor visibility. Good friday was a fine day a little cloudy to start but it turned blue quickly, with temps closing in on the early 20's and it being very hazy any serious flying was a little tough going.

Saturday was, in the words of a pundit, "bloody atomic" Started out blue but by 11am temps were well into the 20's. A high inversion and good dew point separation saw cu's forming by lunch time with the cloud base in excess of 6000ft AMSL, I unfortunately was not flying but I have heard of great reports of beautiful cross country flights in great visibilty and regular 7kt climbs to cloud base. I watched envious from my garden chores as glider after glider topped the winch found a near by thermal and then proceeded to climb very very quickly to cloud base and disappear into the distance. The only slight mis-hap of the day was a certain unnamed pilot in the Astir got a bit lost after mistaking Buckingham for Bicester. After realising the mistake and getting low heading back into the sun made a calmly executed field landing just outside Steeple Claydon to the east. A quick walk, interruption of a garden party and a few phone calls later the Astir was back in its trailer on its way back to the club.

Sunday although warm had very poor visibility and really was not a patch on Saturday. I was on Duty bank holiday Monday and it started out kinda slow, the pundits had they're ships on the grid early but it was not until well after noon that it started to get going, we watched John Potter take a launch in the K8 and climb his way downwind, to the point where we were thinking of starting a land out distance sweep stake, he then returned the airfield nicely at circuit height only to climb away again for a total of 1 and a 1/2hrs. By now the going was good varying tasks of 200K+ were called and the grid got away via a mixture of Aerotow and winch. Phil Gardner had an hour and a half plus flight in the twin acro locally and I finished off the day at 5pm by aerotowing it to 3000ft, a perfect evening flight with thermals still touching 4kts in places.

Well as I sit here writing this the weather has turned decidedly colder and the outlook for this weekend is not looking so good. I will produce a mid week forecast this week as I am in the country, stay tuned.
Lee