Contest Director's Report

Tiger - def;
Noun
1. A very large solitary cat with a yellow-brown coat with black stripes.
2. A person who is very determined.

The Tiger trophy is one of the oldest trophies in the British Aerobatics arsenal of hardware. It’s a stunning trophy, heavy too, and one that we’d all love to win I’m sure. 

This year, the competition for this trophy was to be held at Leicester, a City with its own connection with Tigers, but that’s a different sport and I’d better not elaborate any further. Traditionally this competition was a single-flight event, but it was felt that more flying should be offered to make it worthwhile. So, the ‘Surprise’ unknowns were introduced. Each year, the ‘surprise’ is different. We’ve had next year's knowns (not possible now that we have free knowns), past unknowns from internationals, and for 2023, it was to be another set of Tiger-style sequences. Would we get that far? Read on….

The weather forecast promised better weather for the first day (Sat), and deteriorating conditions for the second day (Sun). I’d hoped for a prompt start so we could get well ahead of the bad weather, but when my wife opened the hotel curtains, her reaction told me that all was not good! Fog!! Not good at all. We arrived at the airfield at 08:00hrs and I could not see the trees across the main runway. Was it cloudy? I couldn’t tell. Was this the story everywhere? I wasn’t sure. Then the messages started arriving. Ping, ping, ping! Yep, Leicester was not unique with its fog, the stuff was all over the place. Would anybody get there? I just didn’t know. 

I pushed the briefing time to 11:00hrs, then 12:00hrs then finally to 12:30hrs, when we were only short of 3 pilots, and one of those had a tech issue. They all arrived safely and were briefed privately, and we were ready to go. Except we weren’t. We only had 1,700ft cloud base and not much heat getting through to warm things up. However, patience is required in this funny little sport of ours, and on this occasion, it paid off. By mid-afternoon we were happily watching the Sports class unleashing their tiger around the Leicestershire skies, followed by the Intermediate boys, but we had a hard finish time of 18:00hrs, so that was as far as we got on day one. 

Day two - CAVOK! Great! - wet grass! Not great! With all that cloud sitting on the ground, we all knew that a new elephant had entered the room (quite the zoo we were experiencing), when the heat of the sun hits the wet grass, it would rise like a phoenix and condense into low cloud. We could see it happening all around us, but for some strange reason, it wasn’t doing its trick where we were. (are elephants scared of tigers?) So, we started flying, with one competitor telling me that looking down at the hole in the low cloud was like looking at a big fluffy toilet seat, but inside a huge ping-pong ball! And we continued flying right up until we’d finished the 2023 Tiger Trophy. I called a hasty prize giving ceremony, as the bad weather had arrived over the south coast and was racing towards some competitor's home airfields, so time was short. 

Other competitions did not have such weather concerns as they were not heading home south, so we buckled down for the next round of ‘surprise’ unknowns, but what was this? 30mins after the prize giving and it was now getting very cloudy. Pilot one, or weather dummy if you prefer, was Blair Keen. He radioed back that it was now 2,500ft everywhere. We waited a while, but when Andy McKee departed for home, he confirmed that it was still 2,500ft, so we called it a day there.

The Tiger Trophy is one that can be won at any level. All the scores are combined so it’s perfectly possible for a Sports level pilot to beat all the pilots from the other classes. This year, the top 3 pilots were all Sports level jocks. James Seward got to wear the Bronze medal beside fellow Sportee (is that a word?) Michael Engstler who took home the Silver, but the Gold medal and the wonderful Tiger Trophy went to Isabel Rutland. 

Huge thank you to everyone who made this competition possible. Chief Judge Ian Scott and his team. Rod Hervé on the keys, and all the staff at Leicestershire Aero Club. But the biggest thank you must go to the pilots. No low penalties and no noise complaints is a great show folks. 

If I can refer you back to the definition of tiger, the winner has undoubtedly earned her stripes this year, and is certainly a person who is very determined!

Brian McCartney, CD