Thursday 14 February

Not able to fly the tug so we had a winching day. Garry Speight very kindly agreed to help out with the operation - he is much more experienced with winch instructing than I. In addition to which I was on the mobile phone practically the whole day trying to get the tug sorted out.

Geoff Sim and Boris flew to Inverell to take the brake parts to Paul Mitrega so he could see exactly what was needed. As luck would have it, Telstra cut off his three land lines and internet service, and he could only get mobile coverage by climbing up a ladder to the roof of the hangar! However even under these difficult circumstances, he managed to do a lot of ringing around to try and source the brake parts. The problem is that they date back to about 1965 and are no longer made - but there are parts available in the US. We could have got them by next Wednesday.

Bob Emery came out to fly but we had no tug. He does not like winch launching, but luckily he was able to take the brake parts into Tamworth (Geoff and Boris bought them back again) where John Wakefield was able to organise a repair to be done.

Meanwhile after a lot of stuffing about in the morning, we got the winch going, and Garry did numerous training flights with John Trezise, Ian Sawell and Peter Robinson. After a lot of false starts we eventually managed to winch Peter in the Junior satisfactorily. It appears you have to back of the power to about half when winching the Junior. Despite the sky looking very good, no one managed a soaring flight. Geoff Sim took the ASH out to the launch point, but had a problem with the engine so did not fly it. Hope he can get it fixed soon.

Boris drove the winch most of the afternoon - I gave him the flight sheet in a pink clipboard just to annoy him, and sure enough he took the bait!

By the end of the day, I thought we had the tug brake problem reasonably under control thank goodness. We all had dinner together and had a pleasant evening yakking about gliding.