29 June, 2011

Greenacres Fly In

Photo: Richard Sunderland
The weekend 25-26 June 2011 marked the occasion of the Greenacres Model Aero Club Fly In. A fly In is basically an opportunity to visit another club, meet fellow fliers and to have a fly at their field in a relaxed club sort of way. The chaps at Greenacres are very good at it too - very organised but friendly and welcoming about it.

Photo: Chris Bott
I've thought I'd like to attend one of these for some years and the meeting of Charity Mass Build 2011 Webbits for a mass fly at the fly in was more than enough to draw me to this immensely popular & successful event. I built my webbit to carry a SLEC bomb release and bomb. The nose of the bomb is filled with flour so that when the bomb is released it dives downwards, splits open on impact and releases a cloud of flour. It works a treat. I'd like to show you some photos but I was too busy flying to take any at the time! However one of those jolly good chaps at Greenacres, Chris Bott has kindly let me have some of photographs shown on this post so thanks go to Chris for those.

I should add that I had the opportunity to speak to Steve Webb himself and he was able to tell me that so far we have raised almost £600 - I think we will pass that when the final count is done.

14 June, 2011

Flying the real thing.

Went up for an hours flying with Flight Academy Barton in a Cessna 152 on 03/06/2011. 

It's a small trainer/private type aircraft and it was great to actually gets my hands on the controls. The Instructor got us airborne and then gave me a domonstration of the controls. After that it was "hands on" for me. After some practice we flew to Southport, down along the coast then inland towards Winter Hill. 

All too soon time was up and we headed back to Barton. The instructor did the landing of course, after all that is the hard bit!