COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

CHAPTER ELEVEN A TESTING TIME
turned out to be the best day of all. Tony D2 , writing at the time in
Sailplane and Gliding, obviously thought so too:
Thermals were extremely strong..... and several on end blew us up
at 1000 ft per minute. Cloud base started off at about 4000ft and rose
to near 6000ft by the afternoon. Maximum possible cruising speed was
the order of the day, and in the Skylark this is about 80 mph for an
average 600 ft per minute climb.
Nick Goodhart, David Ince and I were all released within 5 minutes
of each other..... David and I flew to Andover together; sometimes we
used the same thermal, but more usually we didn't. There were so many
it did not matter.....
Andover was soon reached and then Guild ford in the same manner.
The 'downs' between thermals were so strong that it made judgement of
the final glide difficult back to Lasham..... in the end we were left with
500 ft too much. We all came back together; first David, then myself
and then Nick, to land in as many minutes.
90 miles in just under two hours - with a 20 knot crosswind. In one
respect, as Tony D2 pointed out in his article, we had wasted a possible
500 km day towards the Scottish border. But for Harry, Horace and
myself Whit weekend was just what we wanted - three wins - on three
successive days.
When Bill Ivans arrived at Lasham soon afterwards he was
delighted to hear about the 402's performance - and we saw him on his
way to St Yan with high hopes. Towards the end of the World
Championships we knew that he was lying in the first half dozen and
then, one morning, Horace rang to say that he had crashed. The 402
was a write off.
Flying down the Rhone valley, with the Mistral behind him, Bill
had been working his way into wave and had been caught in the wild
turbulence of a giant rotor. Forced to land his machine had fallen out
of his hands, smashing down into a precipitous and rocky field, and he
had suffered a badly fractured vertebra.
The loss of our trip to the Wasserkuppe was a bitter disappointment
and the end of the 402 was even worse. I would have been happy to
see it go into production just as it was but Harry had other ideas. When
Horace called another meeting at Newbury he showed them to us for
the first time and we were enthralled by his audacity and the
simplicity of his proposals.
His drawings showed the original Meise/Olympia fuselage shell
with a new, all moving, tailplane. Mounting this on the back of the
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