Better late than never.
Sunday 11th

In the interests of maintaining my tradition at Aboyne I managed to arrive 12 hours after everyone else so I thought I would carry on that theme with the Blog.

Having driven overnight I arrived at the airfield to find the local pilots trying to decipher the conflicting weather data from the Internet. We all decided that mark one eyeball and watching what was happening to the sky would be a better indicator. After an hour of watching the wave slot over the Lochs (Lakes) the first radio call of someone at 9000ft caused a bit of a rush for launches.

To cut a long story short the wave over the Dee valley stayed all day allowing Graham Bell to get to 20,000ft for his Diamond Height. Mike Rubin and his P2 also went to over twenty thousand.

I also went up to FL 195 West of Braemar with Dave Williams in the back seat of the DG 1000 as my safety pilot. While we were still climbing at 4 knots we both decided that we might have exceeded the service ceiling of our oxygen set up by a few thousand feet and it was time to go down. Lesson learnt and I will take the facemasks instead of cannulas next time.

Colin