Saturday turned out to be an excellent day in many ways! While it was meltingly hot on the airfield (37-38C for most of the afternoon), that heat generated many mighty thermals. There was pillar after pillar of rising dust visible in every direction wherever you looked. The fantastic soaring weather was put to very good use
- Ben achieved his Silver distance in the K8, and returned to Stonefield successfully afterward.
- Nicola went solo
- James Hobson joined AUGC and commenced training in the K13. Always nice to be able to welcome a new trainee to the club.
- The first pair of AEFs from OWeek (Lauren and Jaedon) got introduced to soaring in the Janus.
- Teal got a nice flight in the K8 after Ben’s Silver distance flight.
On initial examination of the logger trace, it appeared that Ben had turned short of the turnpoint by about 150m. From carefully checking the logger trace, we got two sets of coordinates, one being his release point from the winch launch and the second being the furthest point away from the airfield. Plugging those two sets of coordinates into a Great Circle Distance calculator, the resulting distance came out as 50.097km. In other words, he made the distance by 97m!
A big thanks to Ben for the winch training over the weekend. Great to see more people getting down onto the winch and learning how to drive it.