Contest Director's report

Sometimes, your thoughts wander to memorable times in the past, they often evoke feelings of fun, sunshine and happy times. Well, at least that’s what goes on in my head…. sometimes.

Our competition at Leicester this weekend for the Gunpowder, Roy Legg and Duxford Trophies took me straight back to those happy times.

First of all, Leicester. Always a great location for a competition. Lots of aircraft movements, good selection of places to bed down overnight and excellent restaurants if you know where to look.

The airfield has some great landmarks and a big enough runway running parallel to the A axis making our competitors jobs of staying somewhere in and around the box a bit easier. Apart from that the staff and management committee are very supportive of the Association and ensured we were fed and watered, had our own circuit and they even extended flying times so we could get it all done. Thank you, Leicester.

We had weather. Always a bit unsure at Leicester sitting there around 500ft up on a hill. Well, it didn’t play ball until 13.00hrs on Saturday but behaved itself for the rest of the weekend giving us sufficient cloud base, a gentle off judge wind and sunshine. Thank you, Zeus.

We had a good number of entrants and only lost one or two pre-competition for admin or minor technical reasons. A very good turnout of pilots from Club to Advanced and it made for a very good mix with lots of opportunities for those newer to the sport to learn from others that had been around awhile. Also, there were some spectacular aircraft present, including Tom’s new Extra NG flown superbly by David Thomson. He reckons you could compete with that machine at Unlimited, two-up, no problem! Also, really good to see Steve Bakhtiari fly so well in his Xtreme XA41 taking the Roy Legg Trophy at the end of the weekend. Finally, and I believe on his first outing in aerobatic competitions, Mark Onyett in his bright green Extra 330 took the Gunpowder Trophy.

Then there were the judges. The turnout was as good as the Nationals. It makes such a difference when you have a good field of judges, callers, scribes and runners. There were one or two issues along the way that had to be dealt with to ensure scrupulous marking. We were very pleased that we got all competitors through three flights each with no complaints about the scoring.

Finally, a little bit of drama. Simon Wood in his Edge-360 was tested when needing to execute a forced landing with the engine only at tick-over, getting a round of applause for all that saw it with a perfectly executed landing. Keep practicing people.

All in all, an excellent weekend. Fun, sunshine, happy times and some really good flying.

Phil Massetti
Contest Director