A number of last minute entries meant we had a reasonable turn out in all classes except unlimited for the Nationals. The forecast for the week made it fairly obvious that we would struggle to get full programs completed and unusually the forecast turned out to be almost 100% accurate with thursday and saturday being quite good days, friday being rather mixed and Sunday being completely impossible.

With much assistance from the Saltby Launch point team flying proceeded at a good pace through the competition resulting in enough flights to give a winner in Club,Sports, Intermediate and Advanced classes in spite of the cloud base requiring that many programs were flown as split sequences or truncated programs.

During the competition we had a few box incursions, the most serious by a R44 helicopter that flew directly through the box at around 1500 foot AGL on its outbound and return journey over Saltby airfield, luckily the chief judge spotted it and stopped the flight in progress so the safety process coped with the issue.

Paul Conran's team of Advanced apprentices recently back from a good showing in the Czech Republic for the World Championship did well with Joel Hallewell taking the Advanced gold medal for the second year running.

Once again we owe the success of the competition in large part to the enthusiastic crew at Saltby in particular Rodger Hamilton the ace launch point controller and the team of tug pilots who along with the judges had a couple of long days with minimal breaks to get the contest completed.

Thanks also to ex unlimited glider champion Lionel Sole who turned up to visit and accepted a press ganged position as Judge for 2 of the flying days.