CD's Report from Chris Sills

Having watched the weather for the preceding week, I was fully expecting the usual, scaled down version of our 4 program nationals as had unfortunately been the case for several years. Forecast scattered rain on the Saturday with heavy rain on Sunday already had me preparing for the inevitable early closure of the event.

Driving south on Friday morning through low lying clouds, I was fully expecting any arrivals from the north to have been grounded or at least stopped short of Conington, the destination for our Sport and Intermediate nationals. By the time I had greeted the officials, local team and started to meet the pilots, it was already apparent that most had already arrived, either the night before or earlier that morning thankfully.

As we commenced the first briefing at 10:00, there was only a single pilot that hadn’t managed to beat the weather and, even then, had made a swift arrival during the brief and was quickly brought up to speed. So just after 11:00 the first pilot, Jacob was up in the air and the contest was underway.

We managed to make our way through both classes of known sequence and into the unknown sequences before the flying came to an end just before 18:00, a great result!

As the end of the first day arrived, the intermediate pilots needed to submit their figures for the creation of the P4 Program so we all congregated in the briefing room to go through the process of identifying the 10 figures that would be used to create the final sequence they would all be flying.

Saturday morning started with an 08:00 briefing and we were up and flying again within the hour.

Whilst the contest flights were underway the intermediate pilots were submitting their sequence suggestions for the P4 unknown program and eventually selecting the one they wanted to fly on Sunday.

There are various techniques to running an aerobatic contest and arguably, if the contest runs smoothly, any of them are acceptable. My approach is to operate as both the contest director and flight director, a role not usually operated at domestic contests but is critical when running an international event due to the size and scope of those environments. This helps me keep a track of progress, means I am constantly moving around the event site and therefore am always aware of what is happening with the pilots, aircraft, event and local support teams. Without this knowledge it wouldn’t be possible to be able to make accurate, informed, and safe decisions that ensure the timely operation of the event.

Following some battles for position on the leader board, we finished all the sport flights and declared the medal positions at the end of the day on Saturday leaving only the remaining P4 unknown program for the intermediate level pilots the following day.

On Sunday there were several contenders for the top spots, and everyone was trying hard to keep a clean score sheet. Special mention goes out to Laura, who unfortunately, managed to find the only cloud in the box over the 3 days which resulted in a hard zero of a high K figure, dashing her hopes of taking the prize.

As the final scores came in and I considered the 3 days, we had managed to compete all 4 sequences across 2 classes totalling 80 flights with only a single issue due to the weather, one box incursion and the threat of MAMIL’s (Middle Aged Men in Lycra ... fortunately the cycle race management team stayed away!) overrunning the judging area.

My thanks go out to the pilots and their families, the judging teams, organising team and all the team onsite at Conington, without whom we wouldn’t be able to run the event.

Well done everyone, see you at the next comp.

Chris Sills