Last Saturday a favourable weather forecast and an exchange of emails saw Martyn Kinder and myself at Bosley Minn, a L&MMGA permitted slope in the Peak District. When I arrived I found Martyn already in friendly conversation with the farmer, in fact Martyn was assisting him in setting a new gate in position. This pretty much set the atmosphere for the day; good weather & good company.
We then set-up on the nearby slope over looking a georgous view towards Wincle. We had brought a variety of models and flew them all at some point, though my Eurofighter proved to be too heavy for the available lift so it's flight was quite brief. No great harm done though.
Martyn's models needed more preparation than my one piece SAS Fusion so I was in the air first. I like to use this model for the first flight because it's dependable and tough so whatever the lift turns out to be it will cope. As it turned out it was less than we expected but still enough for us to fly.
Martyn was next up with his own design Glass Slipper, there's lots of information about this lovely model in his blog "Martyn's Aeromodelling Diary", which incidently also has his own story about this day.
Martyn let me have a fly of his Glass Slipper, which I greatly enjoyed because it really does fly as good as it looks and this also gave Martyn chance to get a take a few photos. In fact we exchanged cameras and photographic duties many times so all the photos on this page are a joint effort. This is how the afternoon continued with us taking it turns to fly, photograph and discuss the merits (or otherwise) of our models and flights.
The lift decayed as the afternoon progressed, fortunately I had my Wicked Wing with me which I have kept fairly light for just such an occasion.
The lift decayed as the afternoon progressed, fortunately I had my Wicked Wing with me which I have kept fairly light for just such an occasion.
Martyn hadn't tried his Bubble Dancer on a slope before so during a calm spell he gave it a try and up it went! This model needs very little lift to fly and it turned out that it was also somewhat over elevated for slope flying. This made for an "interesting landing" as the model just didn't want to come down, a challange but not to much of a challenge for Martyn and after a few go-arounds he brought down without any harm.
By the time we packed up we had flown everything that we had brought with us and we were well and truly satisfied that we had made the best the opportunity to get out on the slope.
