This was the third UKRA event that I have attended and unlike the last two I was helping to organise and run this one, such is the life of a UKRA council member. I'm also in the middle of trying to buy a house so saving money is a prime concern as I'm not going to have any in a couple of weeks time. Because of these two factors I only took a couple of rockets with me so that I could maybe fly something when I wasn't on duty, in the end I managed only one flight.

I turned up at the launch site at lunchtime on the Friday to find the marquee all set up and a couple of other UKRA members setting out their rockets and tents. Unfortunately the weather was pretty crappy with on-off showers and low cloud. Not to be deterred we all set about setting up the range in preparation for the hoards of flyers we were expecting.

Flying was scheduled to start at about 5.30pm with a flyers briefing at about 5 o'clock. I was down on the rota to be the announcer so I stepped up to the microphone and everybody now knows who the loud Scottish bloke is. Luckily for the flyers the wind had dropped to nothing after about 6 o'clock so a few flights were made.

I was lucky enough to be donated a H220 by Peter Wells on the condition that it flew that evening, so I quickly handed over the announcer duties to Liz Perman and rushed off to prep my rocket Certainty. The flight was near perfect with near straight boost and a long coast period due to the warmer weather. Unfortunately it landed in a tree dangling over a pond so I enlisted the help of Charles Simpson and spent the next half hour with a big pole knocking it out of the tree.

During dinner and refreshments when the range had shut I started my other job which was to collate all the flight cards, so I can tell you that there were 16 flights made. As per usual after the bar shut a few hardy souls sat in the corridor downstairs and had a few beers while talking rockets. Slowly we all drifted off to bed silently hoping for better weather the next day.

I'll split the report into another two sections at this point, as it'll be too long otherwise:

• Saturday
• Sunday
• View all the photos here.

If you want to know what everyone flew and what the motor statistics were then you can download the flight logs. It's an excel spreadsheet that I knocked up in the week after the event.

• UKRA 2000 flight logs

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Last update: Tuesday, 30-Mar-2004 03:44:38 EST