As I said on Tuesday, the forecast for Wednesday was vaguely promising, with a trough looking like it would sit very close to us but potentially far enough away that it wouldn’t cause too many problems. Over the past few days though, this trough’s forecast position changed to the point where it now looked like it wouldn’t clear until mid to late afternoon. Which is a slight problem when you’ve got nearly 100 gliders to brief, task, launch, and get round.

RASP suggested slightly drier air coming in from the south coast late afternoon, which in essence appeared to be our only hope in another very moist airmass. Looking at the weather radar around 14:00, the trough’s line of rain could be seen (by this time the Met Office had been cheery enough to add a second trough to the synoptic), but also an overdeveloping convergence west of the trough. It’s one of those situations where attitude can really change a situation; a pilot completely regretting taking the few days off work and trying to forget that this comp had ever been thought of would just pass this off as just yet another shower and another reason we weren’t going to fly, but perhaps the optimist would use this as further evidence that the air we would have later would be convective. It didn’t matter anyway as we were scrubbed about 10 minutes afterwards.

Quite a few lenticulars set up at times during the afternoon—nothing major but slightly unusual for our part of the country—and there looked to be wave working along the upwind faces of larger Cu (see the pictures I upload later). WIth the airspace floor above the airfield at only ~4,800′ QFE, any wave wouldn’t take us far, but in slight desperation at the fact that we’d been at the airfield for five days and still had only flown once each, the pilot I’m crewing for and I took off. Cloudbase was an inviting 1,500′, and the ~20kt southerly wind broke up the climbs badly; we were never able to attempt a transition into any wave that might have been about. Back on the ground in 15 minutes, we de-rigged under order from Comp Control; forecast winds for tomorrow are ~30kts, 50+ on Friday.

Positive mental attitude needed, or something like that…