The BAeA Tiger Trophy 2020

Until yesterday it had been 51 weeks since we last got together at an airfield to do our thing in the aerobatic box, and as that event was the glider nationals at Lasham it has in reality been an even longer year and two weeks since we last ran a power event – that coincidentally also being at Leicester, on that occasion for the 2019 RV Event, Gunpowder and Don Henry Trophies. I would say “How time flies!” but of course it really hasn’t during the extraordinary virus pandemic that has smothered normality from the beginning of the year (depending on where you were in the world at the time), since when the BAeA has been through a difficult period of delaying and then cancelling most of the contests in our carefully constructed 2020 calendar of events. However an appropriate degree of careful management as the country has eventually come out of the enforced lock-down has enabled us to put five competitions back in the schedule, all unfortunately for power pilots as the higher level of aeroplane sharing for glider peeps makes the prospect of repeated cockpit sanitisation even tougher for them.

So … a mildly simplified Tiger Trophy with just one Unknown sequence for each category at Leicester airfield became the 2020 ice-breaker, and after our very first Friday evening online Zoom briefing the start of flying on Saturday morning was delayed for a while by the usual cloud-base concerns, and then eventually at just after midday a very pleasant affair it became too. There had been a chance the judges would be sited on the flat roof atop the Leicester tower building, but CJ Brian McCartney found a large puddle together with rather strong and gusty winds when he ventured there to inspect so normality prevailed and the panel quickly repaired to the grass on the north side of the signals square.

A BAeA first I suspect came in the form of a Warm-Up flight, ably conducted by Nick Wakefield who showed us all how his ‘normal’ Advanced Free Known should go. At this point the cloud-base was helpfully rising through 2,800ft and Nick was quickly followed by the first contest flight from Andy McKee with his orange Spitfire look-alike Twister. The wind was pretty much straight down Leicester’s Rwy-28 and thus not a significant issue for pilots’ cross-box decisions, and in rather less than three hours we had all fifteen competition flights comfortably completed. There were some very fine performances for us all to see, judged with care, appropriate mask-wearing and social distancing by Brian’s small team, and by mid-afternoon under a fine blue sky we had the event completed.

As you can see from the results below all four categories were represented in the top five spots, all of them jostling in a remarkably narrow band of less than two percentage points, the lower ranks then spreading downwards as usual with a smattering of unintended errors and the occasional hard zero. As ever, lessons to be learned. For not the first time a delighted Phil Burgess scooped the lovely trophy to give us an Unlimited winner in 2020, his previous victory in this event being back in 2015 with the same DR-107 but on that occasion at Advanced. An oh-so-close one-tenth of a percent behind Phil was Sports pilot James Seward in his Pitts and still in the 78% band came Maciej Kulaszewski in his six-pot Extra. Congratulations to the winners, condolences to the not-so-lucky on this occasion though of course there were also many other category medalists as you can see from the results and the winners line-up photo in the collection below. Now we have just a few days to wait until the next event at Sleap, where with luck we can enjoy a similar degree of helpfulness from the weather.

It was really good to see quite a few BAeA ‘old hands’ who came and went during the course of the day. LAC’s Anne French was pleased to report no noise complaints received, and there was a fair crowd of knowledgeable onlookers to pass their own judgement on the flying. Thanks were due therefore to the Leicester airfield management team, to Brian not only for deft control of the judging panel but also managing to transmit photos of the judges score-sheets to each pilot electronically (no physical passing of paper allowed …), and not least to scorer Jen for playing nurse with the IR temperature measuring machine (everyone passed the test!) and managing all the paperwork with extreme anti-virus care. Despite the very strange human-to-human conditions we all managed to have a splendid day with a great result. More please.

Nick Buckenham, CD.