4th AREA MEETING / ASHDOWN FOREST / 14 June 2009

Report from Gary Oulds
"Some liked it hot"

Most flyers walked through from Stone Hill car park to set up along the ridge looking out across the valley.
Wind direction wasn’t ideal so no change there then! The trees claimed a few victims during the day, but in the end it didn’t turn out too bad being as there wasn’t that much drift .
Ken Taylor surprisingly dropped time quite early in F1B. Rather than completing his BMFA flights, he switched to helping his brother Bob with Classic Glider and Classic Power. Dad remembers seeing Bob Taylor’s power model barrel rolling in on a flight. And later Ken snapped a towline on his Caprice in Classic Glider, which was fished out of some trees but didn’t make a score. Club mate Mike Richardson also had a bit of a disastrous day as his first flight found tall trees. He emerged quite late on, after a long difficult retrieve, only to let the winder slip during a second wind-up which resulted in the fin and rudder of his model being shocked off. He then retired!
East Grinstead were off song compared to their usual high standards and were certainly missing the presence of under the weather man Geoff Stringer today. But some great late afternoon flying from Neil Allen with his power model salvaged their day.
Maidstone’s Martin Stagg only just missed out in Mini Vintage so was the pick of their flyers, ahead of Dennis Bird and John Richardson who backed up well in Mini Vintage and Combined Power. The fact they were not that far behind East Grinstead’s RAFA total on the day reflected the quality of their flying, remarkable considering they only had three entries.
It was certainly Crawley’s day. Alex topped F1B for the first time just dropping one flight in five and his dad Peter maxed out fairly comfortably in Mini Vintage.
Terry Knight chose not to fly but supported Mike Cook, who once again flew superbly well, that’s two max-outs running in F1H, reaching his second Area fly-off of the year.
Also keeping the pressure on and topping the most points scored by one flyer on the day, Crawley superman Robin Willes, sacrificed one pair of shredded combat jeans (of which he’ll be claiming back I guess on Area expenses) and lost a glider to the cause that was timed 15mins OOS. He also tree'd his Supa Dupa mini vintage which was recovered after the contest with only minor damage. Peter Norman also backed up well today with some good Senator flights.
Like Terry Knight, dad sacrificed his own flying today and was tactically held in reserve just incase needed, but with Crawley apparently coasting in the RAFA Shield stakes, he spent the day helping myself so neither had to push themselves to fly.
I had a mixed bag of Wakefield flights, mostly steadily getting worse really after a lucky start when my model climbed up into a huge boomer over Friends Clump after the wing clipped my hat on launch, sending the model rather wildly left. I was then dogged with mechanical hub problems for the remaining flights so its just as well the rest of Team Crawley faired better.

Come the fly-off the wind had swung further west and those that had made it flew just down from Friends Clump.
Robin blew an air horn, which signalled the start of the fly-off. Mike started towing and Peter Cameron launched his Hepcat which arrowed up very steeply recovering well from a slight power stall but struggled to escape and really didn’t get a lot of assistance from the air around despite a very useful motor run, it but was still a good flight to end on and safely down on the Forest for 2.39.
Mike Cook launched from just the other side of the path and early on in the flight it looked trees bound all the way, so it wasn’t a complete surprise really that the model when it finally stopped moving forward was hanging quite visibly in one just up from the pond.
Apparently it was not as high as I thought and it was recovered relatively easily and Mike Cook was back in time to watch Neil Allen’s 4.38 power model fly-off just before 7pm which rounded off the days flying…which also found a tree…
Three tree'd flights in four flights apparently.

A lot of flyers did well really to keep going despite the oppressive rather tropical conditions on the Forest. The day was still well supported all the usual faces plus SAM 35 man Peter Michel decided obviously to come down and risk flying here this meeting and having been before he’s aware that Ashdown can be a pretty but very hard place it’s not perfectly flat and it hasn’t got pockets in the corners like Middle Wallop. Ashdown is probably closer to golf I guess, you go from one bunker to the next looking for your model and occasionally fall in them while searching. He did very well to max out in Mini Vintage but in the end decided not to fly-off, hope he had a good day.
And it was good to see Tony Clark looking well returning easing himself back into the swing of glider flying after an operation earlier in the year.

The national BMFA results can be found on the Free Flight Technical Committee website.