As every pilot knows much of England from 2000 feet looks broadly similar; a patchwork quilt of fields in all directions, interspersed with a few towns, rivers and roads every now and then.  In the case of Lincolnshire in general and Fenland, in particular, most of these land features are noticeably absent.  This is always the challenge facing competitors for the Fenland and McAully trophies, an ideal venue for an aerobatic contest in all respects except for pilot orientation.

The weather forecasters had changed their minds a couple of times in the days running up to the weekend and the tantalisingly good forecast at the beginning of the week became increasingly marginal as the contest approached.  The overall cloud base was reasonable but by the 10.30AM brief on Friday it looked likely that some low cloud passing from the North West might spoil our fun.

This year the inclusion of an unlimited competition in the programme didn’t tempt any of our unlimited pilots so the Friday flying order was limited to the traditional mix of intermediates and a sole representative at beginners.

The opening Intermediate known programme was completed without much fuss although the cloud base was creeping down rather than up throughout the morning and the presence of some dense lower cloud signalled that it was time for a long lunch break.  The afternoon’s events concentrated on the intermediate first unknown, a programme which we had brought forward from the Saturday schedule to avoid flying two unknowns back to back, and which was also completed quickly once the cloud base had returned to a sensible altitude.  Sod's law dictated that Friday evening would see some of the best weather of the entire weekend, but whilst this didn’t help the cause of completing the competition it did at least make for an excellent barbeque at the airfield.

Saturday’s 8.00AM briefing proved as popular with the judges as did with the pilots and ended up as an 8.40AM briefing after various attempts to combat poor weather to the south had been made by inbound competitors.

We had to adopt a mix and match approach to running standard and intermediate sequences together because 10 of the 20 flights that were due to be made that day were in G-EEEK.  Adrian Willis’ valiant efforts to single-handedly bolster the lower ranks of the competition world comes at a price.  The briefing took a solemn turn when Jen Buckenham reminded everyone of the great loss we have suffered with the unexpected and tragic death of David Jenkins, who was originally scheduled to be contest director for this weekend.

Flying commenced in surprisingly good conditions at 9.20AM and despite the indigestion caused by the heavy reliance on one aircraft and a couple of technical gremlins (including a taxiing incident which was more embarrassing than problemmatic) the Fenland and McAully trophies were both wrapped up by 3pm on the Saturday afternoon.

Fenland’s legendary aerobatic box inevitably claimed a few victims but congratulations to both Sam Kempsey, who took the McAully by a respectable margin and to Chris Sills who took the Fenland trophy by an even greater one.  Congratulations also to Mariusz Kuzma who would have taken third place in the McAully trophy had he not been flying HC, a notable achievement after a total of just 5 hours of aerobatic instruction.

Our thanks, as always, to the Fenland Aero Club for being such good hosts and to our own dedicated team from the BaeA, especially the judges led by Alan Cassidy, their assistants and to our unflappable scoring director, Jen Buckenham.