Sportflight

It’s nearly 4pm and we are getting ready to go into town for a parade through the streets, followed by a reception with the mayor! Quick update beforehand.

There were two forced landings this morning near the airfield. One was a Polish visitor whose plane was trashed, unfortunately the other was David Hadley. At around 200ft he sensed rough running so decided to put down on the end of the runway, which was coming to an end all too quickly. He managed to land on the tarmac but the heavy landing was too much, the plane and wing were damaged. Hadders has jumped in his car and is currently driving back to England to pick up a new wing and some other spares. He’s asked Wolfgang for the last start number for the first task, and he expects to fly in it.

We’ve had the first task briefing - a complicated affair with predicted groundspeed, flying in a series of boxes looking for markers, then finding churches from photos, topped off with deck takeoffs and landings. Lots of confusion in the British tent as to what exactly is going on, maybe that particular fog will lift later. There’s no fog on the airfield though. We had rain, now it is back to hot and sweaty.

The team kitchen!

There was some excitement yesterday, not least the few of us who made the trip into town and the night life, getting home after 3am. Blurgh. I also got a quick flight in, taking Zdenka up so she could get some airborne photos. We weren’t quick enough to get a pic of the near miss we had - While at 1200ft I sensed something over my left shoulder, just enough time to see a military jet at 90 degree bank and pulling like fury to avoid us. It missed us by a genuine 10ft, then nearly deafened us with the engine roar afterwards. It was clear the pilot had not seen us until very late, since he flew a slow circle around us to see what he so nearly hit.

Let’s hope that’s all the unpleasant excitement we’re going to get this week…

Mid-morning nap for one person who might have overdone it the night before (not me, I hasten to add!)

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 29th, 2006 at 3:04 pm and is filed under EMC 2006 Germany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.