The Mazda Junior National Aerobatic Championships - 2012

CD's Report

The weather having played such a dominant role in this year's aerobatic events I'll admit to some real concerns about getting this important contest through to a successful conclusion; an early survey of the usual judging position in farmer Trevor West's field served only to heighten the drama - a waist high soggy Rape crop that wouldn't be cut for a long time sitting on a quagmire of mud, that quickly led to the adoption of an alternate nearby patch of WW2 concrete, the aerobatic performance zone however skewed around this time to use runway-34 as a parallel feature to the true cross axis and our usual runway-28 at 60° to the flow .... Chief Judge Brian McCartney and I did at least manage to get a few orange markers out by the time we were ready to start, but an easy box to fly it was not. This is the Mazda Junior National Championships though, so perhaps raising the bar to make it a real challenge is not inappropriate.

Although numbers were down a bit this year enthusiasm certainly was not, and with the arrival of Nijhof's long-distance Pitts right on the appointed briefing time pilot numbers were as expected - but then that old Jetstream driven weather mess we have got so used to this year took over and despite the concerted efforts of the Standard level brigade few had flown by close of play. Rain, cloud base, almost zero wind, gloom ... doh! Even promises of a 1600 clearance by resident BAeA weather guru Peter Macintosh failed to do the job, so we closed the shop in favour of a hoped-for Friday improvement.

 And it did look as though Friday might be better ... but not much. In the end we managed to get the Standard Known out of the way and half-a-dozen Intermediate flights in the bag before the 1900 curfew time and the all-important dash down to the local curry house, with a slightly more optimistic Saturday forecast on the table. At this stage 2012 newbie Chris Brook's S-2A had already stuck the bar up at over 80%, chased by the S-1's of Stephen Evans, Richard Welch, Lauren Richardson, Jonathon Taylor and the rest. Rain dances all round, fingers crossed etc..

 In the end Saturday worked quite well for us; although we managed to get only a couple of flights in before those zillions of tons of surface water leapt into the overhead, the pesky Cu's did slowly grumble up to - and eventually well past - the magic 2,800ft mark and thus 39 flights and a lot of hard work later we finally had a two-level championship in the bag. Despite Richard Welch's best efforts on the way to edging himself up to second spot the Brook's Pitts extended it's margin with a magnificent 81.18% overall, Stephen Evans just managing to stay ahead of Lauren for the bronze. This year marked the first presentation of our new Nigel Arthur Trophy for the Standard level champion, with Pam Arthur on hand to present the gongs and the silverware to the leading trio. At Intermediate level Richard Goodwin and his Eagle ran away with the ultimate prize in spite of gremlins (it was beer, Pete said ...) in the electronics, chased all the way by Peter Rounce's Pitts and Paul Brice in his Extra-300L. In fact the weather had been pretty good after the lunch break, as usual the judges easily distinguished among the crowd by their unusually red and sun-swept faces. The reality therefore was a memorable event with two worthy new champions and some beaming runners-up all ready to pick up the cudgels at the next opportunity, even though we were unable to get all the sequences flown. Huge thanks to the resident Conington management, rewarded for their considerable efforts by a great Saturday crowd who ate them right out of burgers and buns ... they should be so lucky!

Nick Buckenham
Contest Director

PS. Additional pictures available HERE