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Aviation History
1952
1952 - 1878.PDF
30 FLIGHT (Left) The Dutch team rigging their Sky. (Right) the Canadians, with their veteran London taxi towing their borrowed Weihe, the registration of which deserves notice. WORLD GLIDING CHAMPIONSHIPS Final Preparations at Madrid: The Proceedings Open Cuatro Vientos Airfield, Madrid, July ut, 1952. MOST of the teams had arrived when the official opening of the Championships took place here last night in the presence of the Spanish Air Minister. The flags of the contesting nations were flown from the cere monial masts which stand before the magnificent club-house of the Royal Aero Club of Spain, and a line-up of gliders was inspected by the Air Minister. The buildings of the Royal Aero Club, some of which are still under construction, already include the clubhouse with its bars, restaurant and air-conditioned rooms, a swimming pool and hangars. Iced drinks and swimming have been very welcome in the scorching weather now being experienced. The daily tem perature is well over 100 deg F., and, although there is often a breeze, the work of rigging and moving gliders is very tiring. The airfield itself is on a plateau about six miles outside Madrid, which can clearly be seen across the valley. The surface is of baked earth with scarcely a trace of vegetation. Around the field, in addition to the Aero Club buildings, are those of the Spanish Air Force and a factory. The Air Force machines include a Heinkel 111, several Junkers 52 and a Messerschmitt 109, but other aircraft seen range from Fieseler Storchs to a Miles Aerovan. The take-off lanes and trailer park boundaries are drawn on the brown earth each day with the aid of a watering-can filled with white-wash. Gliding so far has consisted of practice flights only. Several teams have been flying for over a week, but only the British team appear to have been attempting cross-country flights of the kind that will be demanded during the contest. The towing for our team has so far been done by Jack Rice of Leicester with his Gemini, using the 20oft-long nylon tow ropes with which our pilots are familiar. At the 2,000ft height of the aerodrome, and at these very high air tempera tures, it is not surprising that the take-off run and rate of climb are poorer than in England. The competition towing will be done largely by the Spanish Fieseler Storchs, using a steel wire. In the enthusiasm to get everyone airborne quickly there has been a tendency to park the gliders tip to tip and to take off very rapidly one after the other. One glider pilot was startled to see another glider a few feet from his wing-tip when the cloud of dust settled after the take-off. The practice day, today, should enable everyone to sample flying under contest conditions before the Championship proper begins on July 3rd. The ground crews will have the opportunity to perfect their retrieving techniques and the Spanish organizing authorities to find out if their plans can cope with the tremendous task which will be set them. The practice nights by members of the British team have shown that the weather conditions here are very much more favourable than in England. Four of the five pilots set off for Huesca, 210 miles N.E. of Madrid. They kept well together while the convoy of four trailers took the road beneath—all eight in radio communication. Frank Foster covered 170 miles of the distance and reached 19,500ft in a very rough and icy cumulo-nimbus cloud en route. He gains for himself a diamond to add to his gliding badge for this climb of over 5,000 metres. Jock Forbes and Lome Welch covered about the same distance while Geoffrey Stephenson made about 120 miles. The retrieving on this occasion was marred by difficulties with the telephone. The Foster crew who telephoned back to the airfield to find exactly where Frank had landed, having lost radio touch with him, were wrongly told that he had reached Huesca and was being aero-towed back. They therefore returned the 200 miles to Madrid only to find that they had to set out again! Other good flights have included out-and-home flights of 120 miles by Philip Wills and Jock Forbes and a 125-mile flight toward the Portuguese frontier by Geoffrey Stephenson, who was stopped by a mountain storm which produced vivid lightning and drenching rain for five hours and made the retrieve an arduous one. These preliminary flights have taught our team valuable lessons. The roads, other than the main routes, are so poor that a landing beside a main road is essential. As a result our pilots will follow a predetermined road route and keep within gliding distance of it at all times. The retrieving crews will then drive along the chosen road until they come to the roadside Union Jack placed by the pilot. If the radio communication from the pilot is working, the trailer crew may have an idea of his position. There is, however, some doubt about this since, as out-and-return flying is forbidden, the pilot should leave his ground crew far behind in the strong thermal conditions and tail wind he should enjoy. The range of the sets used is limited to about 50 miles, and some of the sets have been giving trouble and cannot be relied upon. The glider pilot will telephone, on landing, his exact position to the reporting station at the Madrid airfield so that the trailer crew may be informed when they telephone back. The operators of the three telephone lines will have to take accurately messages in many languages from anything up to 60 pilots. Since the English-speaking group is by far the biggest linguistic group it is to be hoped that the present lack of English-speaking organizers will be remedied before the contest begins. (Teams to whom English is the native language are Great Britain, United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia, while the Swedes, Danes and Dutch are much more at home in English than in Spanish.)
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