BECCLES - 28th April 2007 Report by Howard Cox
Someday I expect that we will get a competition at Beccles with the windsock pointing down the runway but it does strike me as odd, whenever we have a competition in Suffolk we have to contend with a howling crosswind. This year was no exception and with some thermal effect from the go-kart track close to the threshold of 09, I found it extremely difficult to get the Piper Cub to land anywhere near the zero line during the spot landing phase of the competition. What with that, making a complete hash of the pre-flight planning and failing to see all but two photographs I am surprised to find myself writing this report on the days events. Obviously my cunning plan to come third or fourth was thwarted by the rest of the field who must have found far better ways to accumulate penalty points than I did.
The entry list for the competition although quite small was made up with some old Open Class hands and some fairly new to the game in the Sportsman Class who are just learning the skills needed for Precision Flying. Two who must be commended for taking part were Celeste Goschen and Guy Plenderelith, as both have hardly let the ink dry on their PPLs after training with our hosts, Rainair. What a fantastic way to show that the skills learnt for the PPL can be used to great effect in a tough competition. It just goes to show that with a bit of determination and effort even the newly qualified can extend their flying skills, find an incentive to do that bit more than fly the local patch and still have an enjoyable day messing about with planes.
The route Rodney set covered much the same ground that we have flown over in previous competitions but that did not make it any easier. Suffolk and Norfolk can be summed up as just a mass of small villages, small roads and acres and acres of yellow rape fields, oh and a few watery areas. It is very easy to mistake one hamlet for another, head off in totally the wrong direction and end up miles from where one should be. Luckily this year I found the start and managed to stay on track all the way round, found most of the ground targets although a few had been blown adrift in the strong NE wind. The photographs though were another matter, taken before the trees had turned green and the rape yellow and I had great difficulty relating the fuzzy pictures with anything on the ground and I only saw two out of the nine.
Not only were the pictures fuzzy but looking at the results I suspect that all of us in the open class had fuzzy brains as well, I put it down to the long into wind flight to get to Beccles, not that I was too lazy to have done any practice before the first competition of the season. The sportsman class pilots though did extremely well. Mastering the tricks to get through flight planning in a quick and logical manner is half the battle in achieving a good overall result in the air. Instead of just sitting round gossiping until it was our time to work, this year Rodney insisted that each new crew were given some help and tuition during the flight planning stage to be properly prepared before launching off on the cross country flight.
Under time pressure to get back to Devon before sunset I flew in the first group for the spot landings and after the barrier landing did a touch and go, so have no idea how everyone else coped with the landing test. I found that the conditions were very tricky and was not at all surprised to see Guy flying ahead of me cutting short his attempt after the third landing. Many thanks go to the friendly folk at Beccles for letting us use their airfield and lets hope that next year we get a calm day.
RESULTS:
Open: Sport:
Chris Barnes 613 John Waterman 790
Howard Cox 743 Celeste Goschen 2799
Malcolm Evans 971 Guy Plenderelith 2913
John Marsh 1223
Martin Reynolds 2083