{"id":546,"date":"2009-07-10T19:10:55","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T18:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/?p=546"},"modified":"2009-07-12T21:50:31","modified_gmt":"2009-07-12T20:50:31","slug":"friday-10th-july-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/?p=546","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 10th July 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Geoff writes:<\/strong> a pretty good day in the end. Andy and Bry stayed here last night. This morning we went out to the Long Mynd<\/a>, a little late because Andy had been giving us a briefing on airspace in the Peak District. Lots of PGs in the air, but quite strong, and forecast stronger, so I hesitated choosing which wing to fly. In the end, I chose the PG. Judith launched before me, then I launched, and got whipped up 500′. Too scared to turn, I pushed, slowly, forwards. After messing around on the front for a while, never getting low, Judith and I climbed out – she was a bit higher and further back – with one other glider. Andy climbed out a little later.<\/p>\n

Getting to base, Judith had already gone on a glide, and I eventually followed her. She got very low behind Caradoc, and got a snotty little climb from a few hundred AGL. I went in high above her, and watched as she climbed straight past me! We both got to base again, her a bit sooner than me, and she went off on a glide, rather than wait for me. A fatal mistake for her, she got nothing, and eventually landed for about 19k.<\/p>\n

I was more patient, and got another couple of climbs – it was hard to keep out of cloud. The wind had picked up, and Judith had said it was strong when she landed, so I was travelling downwind pretty fast. Airspace was becoming a problem, as were my GPS batteries – in spite of registering full at the start of the flight, they were now nearly empty, and I didn’t want to negotiate airspace without the GPS.<\/p>\n

In the end, I decided to land, and just went for a long glide from base to the ground – flying through lift on the way. This was, obviously, a bad mistake, since once I looked at the airspace more closely, I could possibly have successfully negotiated it, and been on track for a much longer flight than the 41k I did.<\/p>\n

But I was pleased with the flight, for once I thought I flew quite well. Base, for me, was about 4800′ – less further south. Mark Leavesley (Happy Birthday, BTW) did 71k, with a base of 4100. Martin Knight and some others\u00a0got to Kidderminster, not sure how far.\u00a0 And some people did a lot less.<\/p>\n

My claim to fame today is that leaving at the same time, in the same air, as the leader of the XC league, I managed to fly signficantly further than him (oh well, 4k!). Doesn’t often happen that I outfly Andy (in fact, probably never has before, or will again), but it is nice when it does!<\/p>\n

Tracklogs on the XC pages, see tab at top of the page.<\/p>\n

Oh, and just to put our flights into perspective, the Midland Gliding Club, the sailplane pilots at the Mynd, have a comp on this week. Yesterday – on what was to us a very indifferent day, with the max height about 900′ ATO – one of their pilots flew from from the Mynd to the Isle of Wight, and got back as far as Shobden. That’s a very long flight!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Geoff writes: a pretty good day in the end. Andy and Bry stayed here last night. This morning we went out to the Long Mynd, a little late because Andy had been giving us a briefing on airspace in the Peak District. Lots of PGs in the air, but quite strong, and forecast stronger, so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=546"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":566,"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546\/revisions\/566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.judithmole.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}