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British Tandem PG declared goal record

Published on:
19 Jun 2017

Young UK pilots, Theo Warren and Lawrie Noctor have set a new British Tandem declared goal record after a 71 km flight. Lawrie shares his experience: "Both myself and Theo have been talking about breaking the tandem declared record for some time now, however it was until last month Theo got his tandem rating. On Saturday night, we agreed the weather looked good enough to give it a go and decided Theo would be first to pilot and I would do the next good day out on the tandem. After setting a 66km goal that Richard had given us (thanks) we decided to change it slightly and increased it to 71km to a small village called Spaldington just before getting airborne. We ended up taking off from Stanage edge late at around 1pm with it blowing around 18-27kmh and completely blue with just a few high cumulus down wind. After two small beats of the sun baked rocks we were climbing with a small gaggle and on our way. First glide was really sinky and after only 8km glide we both thought we were going to be on the deck. The initial climb out was around 3m/s so we were looking for something equally as nice for the next one and we found it low on the western edge of Sheffield. With the wind now WSW and our glides taking us closer to Doncaster airspace we had to start thinking about cross winding under the 4500’ ceiling limit (thanks to whoever opened the Upton corridor). At this point we still hadn’t even reached cloud base nor could we get to it due to the ceiling limit. The Mag 2 seemed to be gliding really well at about trimmers in half released position and climbing on full slow. At this speed we were just about able to climb as well as the other gliders but smoke them on speed on glide. Again, we had lots more sinky glides with our lowest save being about 850ft AGL and a seagull saving us! We had a long debate whether to leave our 0 up and trust a seagull but we mutually decided to give it a go and glad we did! We pushed as far north as we could to get out of the airspace and finally around the M62 we had a nice 3.5m/s climb to cloud base at around 6000ft. From here it was a lovely 19km final glide into goal which we celebrated with some big wing overs. In hindsight, we could have easily carried on but we were super stoked to have made goal so called it a day at around 4pm. From here we got a lift to the train station from the kind farmer where we only waited a couple of minutes for train straight back to Sheffield….perfect!” To see their track, click here Congrats guys and cheers from all the team at OZONE.

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