Sunday 14 October 2023

At Halton, we got flying early with a small, but motivated team and our last landing was at around 18:00. Our UCL trial visitors appeared to enjoy themselves. We had mainly short flights but there were strong thermals for brief periods and we had to stop a few times to allow some big rain showers to come through. There was another pause due to the duty Full Cat playing with runway changes!

It was also great to see the Discus (506) airborne again following its two-year long refurbishment.

Many thanks to everyone for their hard work and especially to Bryan Harvey for a fully shift in the ASK 21 (R28) and also to Dan Kearney and Ben King for their general support.

Meanwhile, the SkySight forecasting tool promised the expedition members up at Aboyne a great day full of wave. Unfortunately, it did not come to fruition and they spent most of the morning and early afternoon at the local café, At the Sign of the Black Face Sheep, and the Aboyne’s farmer’s market due to very rough towing conditions.

In the late afternoon, the Discus 2cT (R6) and Martin Langford’s LS6c (335) got rigged. Paul Field and Dmitry Leyko flew in the Duo Discus (26) and Martin took off in 335, but the wave was very broken up and with rain showers coming through, both had to land.

Phil MacKenzie had got himself all ready in R6, but rightly made a no-go decision when the rain showers began coming through. He consoled himself that night with his camera and engaged in a bit of light astrophotography to produce a stunning photo of the Milky Way galaxy - see picture below!