SportAvex 2008 mini report

My first airshow of 2008 was this past weekend's SportAvex at Tauranga airport. I'd been looking forward to going to this for some time, and we initially were going to go over in DQV, the Arrow. This was canned at the last minute as the aircraft was going to be stuck in maintenance, and luckily JGP, our 180hp 172 was free. Myself, Aaron and one of the stalwarts of the club, Mike Cuming, took JGP over, while Euan and Gavin went in FWS. We happened to be ready to go before Euan so I led the way, and it was kind of cool to look back and see one of our aircraft following us. There was confusion over the chat frequency, which we cleared up before the return flight, so we weren't able to talk to each other, but I was able to follow his progress as we both reported at Matamata then Tauranga. On the way in, I got my call in mere moments before some turkey who had no clue how to talk to a tower managed to block the frequency and Euan had the first of several holds on the way in, poor bastard! I was damn lucky with my timing, and were on the ground very quickly. The guy in the Follow Me quad bike buggered off in the other direction so we had to fend for ourselves for parking. Shortly after parking up, the plonker who held up the frequency on the way in decided that he wasn't just going to park in front of us, he was going to see just how close he could get without clipping us with his wingtip.

Anyway, onto the show... The static aircraft were nice, didn't seem to be quite as many as last time, but there were some nice aircraft parked there, including a prototype Falconi (is that right?) on it's first ever public outing. One major benefit of getting in early (we landed 9.15) was we could take our time and look around and not miss the stuff flying past in the afternoon. I felt quite unwell most of the day (headache plus heat plus dehydration) and my heart wasn't really in the photography side of it - by 3pm I just couldn't be bothered, but I did get a few good shots, which was nice. I enjoyed the MX2, flown by the chap who formerly had ZK-NUT - that guy's just crazy!! The Vampire and P51 were just awesome, as you'd expect, and all in all it seemed quite a good show. We lost Mike halfway through - it took him so long to get back to the plane for his folding chair he decided to stay there - smart move there Mike!!

The announcer merits a paragraph - he was a good, talkative announcer, who got the odd fact wrong, talked in the middle of the otherwise silent glider display, and had some odd fixation with "High Intensity Strobe Lights" - seemed like he mentioned it 3 or 4 times for every aircraft, while the rest of us were wondering if anyone's *ever* spotted an aircraft because of it's lights! I got so pissed off with this, that by halfway through, to the lads' amusement, I marched over and told them to tell him to knock it off. That only worked for half an hour and he was again on about the damn High Intensity Strobe Lights! Argghh!!!

The return journey looked to be nasty, with a strong wind on the ground, although the trip back was in fact very smooth. We got going as soon as possible, closely followed by Euan. The guy in line in front of us in a Titan Tornado did the reputation of microlights absolutely no favours at all - he had to be told twice to line up, and after being told twice his clearance and "cleared for takeoff", there was about a 30 second delay then we heard him get on the radio with a faltering call "romeo sierra romeo... is.. ready.." Again he was told his clearance and finally got the message. Thank God he was going a different way to us!!!

A couple minutes after we took off, Euan got going, and we were at last on the same frequency - it was good to know where he was, and that he could see us. Something to do with High Intensity Strobe Lights, methinks :-)
I think that in the climb to 3500 over the Kaimais he caught up to us somewhat, but in the descent back down we managed to get away from him - I think maybe I was just a bit more gung-ho with the throttle.
Presumably just to make up for Euan getting shafted on the way over, a guy in a Beech 1900 managed to screw up Hamilton Tower's best laid plans for sequencing, which ended up with me having to go round and join back behind Euan for a landing on grass runway 25L. I was very happy with both my landings - the one in Tga on the reduced length grass (500m) had us down and stopped in 300m, and back in Hamtown I floated a little bit as I perhaps pulled the power back a tad slowly, but we were stopped in 400 odd metres.

A great day, thanks all for coming, especially to Euan for agreeing to take a second aircraft, that just freakin' rocked dude!