CD's Report
Friday - As I drove down to Devon during the morning I wasn't sure whether it was more likely that:
   a.) we would be running a flying competition or
   b.) I would rescued by helicopter from an unbelievably flooded M4.
Having waded the 140 miles to the airfield it was heartening to see that the monsoon had so far missed that corner of the southwest and 15 pilots had been able to arrive ahead of the bad weather. Howard & Rachel, plus most of the judging team, had already arrived and we quickly set up, got organized, re-affirmed the box position, agreed the runway and joining procedures and negotiated a final arrangement to keep the active parachute teams away from aerobatic activity. This competition was always going to be an organizational challenge as we could only launch 3-4 pilots a time before closing down for 15 minutes an hour to allow for the king-air to dash to 15,000 to allow 7-14 people to attempt suicide directly over the box.

Having got everything done we conducted a full briefing for the 2 available beginners and then managed to cram one whole scoring flight into the next 6 hrs. This only took place as Simon Janvrin had kindly arranged to fly with Martina Willis in the Slingsby following a landing accident in the Extra 200. Richard Champion tried hard to follow on but had to abandon given that the cloud base had now become unworkable and well below minima. The only big surprise was that the one 15 minute parachute slot ended up taking 37 minutes for a single lift and we lost the only other flyable window to re-launch Richard. We found out later that the King-Air had been held by ATC at altitude due to the mass diversion to Cardiff of all traffic from Gloucester Airport (now a lake) and flights of RAF Helicopters scrambling to various rescue missions up the M5. My mobile rang every 5 minutes with the "I still can't get there" calls from pilots huddled in hangers all over England, most of them shouting over the noise of heavy rain banging on the hanger roof. We did manage to get two arrivals late in the afternoon, with the prize going to John Calverley who appeared to have flown from Gransden in heavy rain and not above 500ft to an airfield with an 815ft AMSL elevation ! - he even had an umbrella in the cockpit of his Yak 52.

Saturday - We all arrived on time for an 8am briefing, got ourselves organized and dashed outside at 8.30am to watch the clear blue sky fill with scattered cloud at 1300ft. We tried twice to complete Beginners during the morning but had to abandon due to cloud issues. At 13.30 we finally commenced the Intermediate Known and we managed to run through the flying order as fast as we could given the organized breaks and persistent low cloud and rain showers that effected the box. Every pilot tried hard to get going on time and two of them took off 8 times between them in order to complete a single sequence. We finally finished Intermediate just after 16.00pm but were unable to start Standard due to a prolonged spell of low cloud and rain, so I decided the call it off at 17.30pm as it was no longer feasible to commence & complete the Standard known before a reasonable "knock it off time" of 20.00pm.

Typically we wouldn't award a prize for a single competitor but given that Martina had suffered a significant landing accident in the Extra and still managed to fly in a less familiar aircraft we felt a 1st place prize for Beginners was well deserved based on effort.

I'd really like to thank Paul who took-off 5 times to try to get a sequence fitted into the small gaps in the low cloud.

Thanks to everyone to turned up - we tried our best !
Simon Cattlin