For those who made up some excuse to absent themselves from Easter family gatherings it was a booming day that saw 18 launches and some 12 hours flying time.   As The Vicar said after his last flight of the day, “The Weather Gods Were With Us”. The Vicar sort of knows this stuff!

Despite being on Easter break, a trio of our Cosford MEF gliding scholarship students joined us for the day and the setting for them for their first few flights could not have been better.  All of them got some super time in the air, in conditions that could only benefit their training.  Rahul took his first flight in the safe hands of The Vicar.

Oliver continued his MEF flying programme with instructor Matthew Cooke who we borrowed from the Mynd for the day.  Many thanks for your help today Matthew.

Our third new MEF member was Kiera who had been to visit our stand at the Cosford FIT4Life day.  Kiera had travelled from Manchester to spend the day with us and there was no better reward than to place her for her three flights in the capable hands of Myndie instructor Nigel (land-out) Lassiter.  We did point out to Kiera that we hoped that the “land-out” bit was optional today.

Meanwhile other club members were keen to test themselves in the conditions and some did better than others.  Mike O took the Iron Thermal out for a trip but only spluttered around at low level trying to get the engine to fire up!

Elsewhere, the pair of Astirs could be seen floating about at 4,000ft knocking the rust off their thermalling techniques before thinking about cross country tasks later in the year, although today was the perfect 50Km day.

Whilst Terry took a trip with Matthew, it was great to see Nigel continue his return to flying.  Nigel took a flight of over an hour in R22 with Myndie instructor Russ Attwood.  Sophie enjoyed a flight in R66 in great conditions in the afternoon and claimed hog-of-the-day. More aerobatics were on the cards and this time for #vulcanbomber who had missed out yesterday.  In R22 and with Ian in the back seat they took a launch to 4,000ft behind our hard working tuggie Colin……

….and on the way down Ian was given a complete demonstration of the Vulcan pull up toss-bomb technique for lobbing an iron bomb that landed with a “plop” on top of some unsuspecting salmon in a remote lake somewhere in the UK!

All-in-all a great day out in conditions that were probably the best of the year thus far, so good that that we called up the Ex-Dear Leader in North Carolina to let him know - he is deffo missing us!! Finally, thanks to instructors Matthew, Nigell and Russ without whom we would have been pressed to manage our programme today.