Rougham 2010 By Tony Hooper
This event turned out to be as good as we expected (on the Saturday anyway!)
An excellent collection of models which
were flown all day in absolutely perfect weather conditions – a light
breeze and sunshine!
In fact the weather was so suitable that we had the biggest display yet by
the Dawn Patrol and they performed extremely well re-enacting some famous
dog fights of WW1.
One very interesting fact was the plethora of 2.4Ghz was so apparent that
Phil Atherton in the transmitter tent had very little to do all day as there
were only 10 “steam age” 35Mhz aircraft booked in. This has a
downside of course which resulted in some of the slots being very, very, busy
and requiring a great deal of concentration for all the pilots concerned.
The biggest example of this was the Bomber slot, originally comprised of 2
B17’s flown by Tony Hooper and Dave Johnson and Mike Eccles with his
Handley Page Harrow. After a short while they were joined by a large number
of fighters flown by the TJD team and several other individuals which proved
very spectacular for crowd but very hard work for the pilots and the John
Cross the Flightline Controller.
There were some very good individual displays, notably Ali Machinchy with
his “prop hanging” or rather “jet hanging” jet, Mark
Hinton with his very impressive “swing wing” F14 Tomcat, and Steve
Carr with his 60% (yes that is correct!) Extra powered by a 546cc engine driving
a 41” prop!
There was also a most impressive display by Dave Johnson with his Airbus –
an aircraft that needs fairly good conditions to be able to handle in a stable
way and his performance to the music of “We are going to Barbados”
which has the introduction of the talk between the aircraft and Air Traffic
Control before take off helped to bring an air of realism to the display.
All this was complimented by an excellent commentary from Colin Hammond throughout
the day.
A pity about Sunday which was a complete
“wash out” but everyone had so much flying the day before that
it made the journey worthwhile. There was a very good trade attendance and
the big crowd on Saturday must have compensated a little for what must have
been a rather poor day for them on Sunday. Oh well, that is the British weather
and we have to make the best of the good days.
