Still not sure who set me up with the writing of this, I've not written anything since the Newsletters in the early 90's. Investigations are ongoing, in the meantime I guess you want to know what happened.

I arrived at the field about 10:15 and the sun was already high in the sky for what was a glorious day. Most of the setting up had already been done, and no I hadn't planned it that way.

We had 12 flyers their names can be seen below and models ranged from 3D aerobatic to scale to trainers.

All tasks were straight forward but difficult to do well,and tended to favor Trainers they were -

Climb & glide - climb with up to a 3 min engine run from wheels off, cut engine (or close throttle to idle) and glide to touchdown or power on.

Fly for a pre determined time. The time was cleverly calculated from the number of years you had been flying solo, it being judged that the longer you had been solo the better you were at judging time - hmmmm.

Spot landing, not so much a spot but a series of strips with scores for which ever one was landed in. There were ways to increase your score these being - double points for a dead stick approach & landing - triple points for dead stick and inverted approach & landing.

Hands off - You were allowed 3 minutes to trim your model, you were then timed from hands off the sticks until you lost your nerve or model.
It was during this event that Ross won crash of the day without actually flying. Ryan was flying hands off and with it being Ross's plane was waiting for him to say when to retake control, Ross seeing that Ryan was flying left him to it.

Scores ranged from a massive 37 for me down to 14 for Brian Campbell. Unfortunately for me it was the lower score which won.

1. Brian Campbell - 14 pts
2. Dave Ashenden - 17 pts
3. Colin Shearing - 18 pts
4 Tom Charman - 18 pts (3 & 4 had to fly-off)
5. Raymond Drake - 19 pts
6. Richard Sturtevant - 20 pts
7. Ross Adams - 23 pts
8. John Oliver - 31 pts
9. Phil Mitchell - 33 pts
10. Ryan Adams - 34 pts
11. Peter Porter - 36 pts
12. Andy Green - 37 pts

My Cougar suffered from repeated engine failure and just could not get the thing set up. During the day a I think everyone had a go without success. It was the suggestion that the clunk had come off inside the tank that lead to the final solution, which was all 3 tank tubes had borken off just where they exit the rubber bung inside the tank. Any theories on what caused this would be appreciated. There's nothing like good maintenance, and that was nothing like good maintenance.

Through out the day we had an egg dropping competition. At a £1 a go flying a trainer you had to hit a painted target on the ground. This was won by Jon Tappin with one of the last flights of the day.

The Lunch BBQ was excellent with bugers, sausages, pork & chicken with salad & colesaw all wash down with copious supplies of beer, wine & softdrinks. The 3 ladies Dane, Gill & Polly did a magnificent job keeping everyone fed, they seemed to have been cooking for hours.

To keep the youngun's happy (looking at the average age of club members I put myself in the youngun's category) there was a letter search, the letters when found spelt HELICOPTER which was the winning word. The girls won but there were prizes for all the children. There was also an activity where a cardboard plane was repeatedly beaten in an attempt to get it to give up it's cargo of sweets.

Throughout the day Mitch was on the trainers giving goes to anyone who fancied a try. Nice one Phil good bit of PR.

For those of you that are interested in such things here are some statistics about the day. (All numbers are approxiamte as people kept moving about).

Attendance - 60
Fly for fun entrants - 12
Girls - 7
Boys - 6
Dogs - 3

If you have pictures of the day you would like to see here, email them to me - hawk1@wimbornemac.org