ENTERPRISE AT SUTTON BANK 2007.

Fantastic! 34 entries for Enterprise, the best for several years.

Preparation went like clockwork thanks to all the staff at Sutton Bank. However as the days drew nearer there seemed no let up in the soggy weather that bedevilled the whole of the UK in June and July 2007. Even on the Friday before the comp we looked to be in for a poor week yet it was one of the best with 6 days of competition flying. Four days had several gliders flying over 300k, Justin managed 625 one day and on the last day a speed task was won at 207kph!

Enterprise is about exploiting the weather to get the very best out of every day. Normal competitions are about having a clearly defined task and rules and knowing that the position you have at the end of the day represents your ability on as level a playing a field as you can reasonably get. We are not that concerned with fairness although never deliberately unfair but always striving to enable the best to be got from every day. Every year Chris Nicholas gives a short homily on, “Listening carefully to the task setter, there can be considerable benefit obtained from Enterprising interpretation of the Task.”

On that note, let’s start at the last day of Enterprise. A gloomy day with damp westerlies that could produce poorish hill lift with the slight possibility of wave. Two alternative tasks were set for the second time in the week; “A Hill Scramble”, a 100k triangle, that could with difficulty be flown in bits of hill lift and scratty thermal and secondly “Sam’s 200 k cats cradle” a wave task starting at Patley Bridge 30 k away over the Pennines. As task setter I was to blame for not having declared that the normal height loss of 1000m applied to these tasks. The wave developed and the day won by Stuart Naylor flying the 100k task in wave starting at just under 15,000 feet and finishing at 4000 feet having achieved a speed of 207kph. Alan Irving and Mike Greenwood were rather poor runners up at 171 and 136 kph respectively!

This was the first time we introduced the idea of alternative tasks. “A Yorkshire 500” and “A trip to Wales”. If either of these two tasks had been completed it would have been a first for the Yorkshire Gliding Club. Soggy air down the Cheshire Gap prevented the raid on Wales and high cover spreading from the west prevented anyone completing the 500. However the seed was sown and within a month Bill Payton did the “Trip to Wales”. We hope to see the “Yorkshire 500” completed within the next year. Every club that hosts Competition Enterprise tends to fly more enterprisingly.

On Day 2, Bill exploited the “String of Pearls” where a series of turning points were set to the north and the south. The rule being that a point could not be turned more than once and the next point had to be nearer the start. Bravery scored the highest! Bill went south and used some very exciting weather (see photo!). Indeed big climbs in cloud were the order of the day. I found my variometer and the controls seized up at about 12,000 feet on each of my big cloud climbs. The rewards were magnificent views down ice encrusted wings through the cloud tops with the Lake district to the West and to the East tiny tankers on a deep blue North Sea.

The best day’s weather with gin clear sky and a cloud base of 5000 feet was day 3. “A Day at the Races” with 13 race course turning points from Doncaster to Carlisle. Another great day for cloud climbs, Justin Wills flew an epic 625K with many pilots flying over 300k and one of our John Fielden memorial scholars, Liam Watt flying a K8 in his first competition, flew 189k making 6^th place.

Jon Hart took leave from his “Director” duties, took off after everyone else and headed for Hexham racecourse. Having struggled out of 2 “Hexham holes”, Jon, lemming like and at 5pm decides to press on to Carlisle only to meet a convergence stretching to the Lake District. A cloud climb provided a long glide following the western edge of the Pennines to Appleby, then east to the only sensible looking cloud over Darlington. Jon gains permission from Teeside Airport to try it and also gets the invitation to land at the airfield by a hang gliding controller should it fail. It did! If you think you’ve got security problems going by air these days then don’t try entering an airfield with an empty glider trailer.

A full account of his flight is elsewhere but here’s Jon’s summary of this flight “270k, not a mega distance several others did more and Justin an amazing 625k, but using all forms of lift (excluding wave) several very low points, getting away in differing ways but all text book. Fabulous views, beautiful light, lovely terrain, flying down the full length of the western edge of the Pennines, a long glide right across the Pennines, with just one short thermal, straight into an international airfield and all legit. That epitomises Enterprise for me”.

Justin Wills with 3025 points won the competition with Lindsay McLane a mere 100 points behind. Lindsay also won the John Cadman trophy for the most enterprising flight where his local knowledge got him up in wave while most of us struggled in the down, on the first day. Phil King who was our excellent met man for the competition came third flying jointly with Diana. The man who deserves the most thanks for hard work and thoughtful input is Bill Longstaff who was our scorer. Normal Enterprise with all the possible variations is difficult enough but Bill coped with the alternative tasks as well. Surprisingly our self-scoring back up system worked better than ever, enabling provisional scores to be calculated as soon as the last pilot had landed.

One quote that could sum up Enterprise from Chris Stoddart a retired airline pilot after Justin’s 625k in nine hours “Nine hours for 625K? I expect to get to Singapore in that time!” Winning Enterprise demands hard work but without a doubt it’s worth it!

Next year we are at North Hill and full details will be on the Enterprise web site.

Nick Gaunt

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