Raindrops on the wing

Looking at today’s weather forecast yesterday, it looked like the only flyable window would be from 10:00-12:00 before an occluded front swept through drenching most of England. The fact that briefing was postponed until 11:00 essentially spelt out already that we weren’t going to fly. The briefing was fairly hasty and prizes were distributed for yesterday’s Regionals A Class podium sitters, with an extensive “How I Done It” speech by winner, Julian Hitchcock.

Rain arrived just after 12:30, as forecast, and there was very little to do for the rest of the day. The forecast for tomorrow was summed up today by someone else in the bar—it’s one of those days that in a good comp, you’d be glad to say that it’d be a bad day and would be pleased to take the day off.  Unfortunately, we’re not in that situation, and there’s much expectation for what may well be the two Nationals’ first flying days. It will almost certainly be a late afternoon start, as one trough is passing through overnight, with another forecast to be directly overhead or slightly to our northeast at 13:00. The outlook for Thursday and Friday is poor, but I’m not quite sure what to make of RASP’s forecast for the weekend; it’s predicting a much higher cloudbase of 3000′-3500′ but large areas of weak climbs, and with the potential for it to overdevelop considerably.