Wing camera mountings: discuss

Well, I’m not doing that again. Today’s bright idea was for me and Flewett to fly with wing cameras mounted a metre out on the wing. What a boo boo. The turbulence created made flying below 55kts a nightmare with all sorts of stick vibration and as for pulling hard into gusts in a thermal: forget it. To be fair we did get some OK shots but was it really worth turning around at Seyne and coming back to Serres to remove the cameras and take a relight? No.
Anyhoo, having removed the cameras and started again at 2 p.m. we set off to Logis du Pin again and had a reasonable run. The Belgian Paragliding Open is on at Laragne and we counted over 80 canopies as we ran in at 90 knots, pulled up in their climb, rejected it and blasted on towards Digne at 100kts. If those guys have any sense they’ll be forcing the chutes into skips and placing orders for 15m gliders tomorrow. We made good time down to Logis and went past the turn to take a climb in a convergence at 8kts. From here we ran North along the convergence, occasionally getting too enthusiastic and getting too far East before realising they do Pizzas in Serres so there was no good reason to land out in Turin. We had a nice cruise past Lake Brice and up towards the Cime de la Bonnette.


Popping into the Barcelonnette valley I figured there was bound to be a Texan climb on Siguret but it let me down badly. Instead we wound up scrabbling around the slopes near Jausieres before finally getting away. We got abeam Briancon at 5 p.m. and it was looking a bit flat in Bardonecchia plus the rest of the group had headed South long ago, so we ran over to the Tete d’Amont for a nice 6kt climb then into the Ecrins for a glide home. The one cloud ahead lay 4.9kms from Gap and the 5km exclusion zone so we couldn’t use that but did sneak in round the Grand Ceuse to appear back over site to find the home ridge still working with a constant 4 kts. That meant I had to go and give Chabres another little seeing to and encourage the remaining parapenter crews to show their appreciation with two fingered salutes before heading home for the traditional smoker. Dinner on site was excellent – 5 courses and oodles of beers and wine for the princely sum of 20 euros. Bargain!