Dougs Day Event

The Doug's Day event was instituted by our greatly missed club elder Doug Grinham as a celebration of the Australian Vintage Stunt heritage. The intention is preferably to fly Australian designs through the MAAA Vintage Stunt pattern but to ensure good numbers, any Vintage eligible design is allowed, with some poetic licence allowed by the Event Director at times.

This year saw eight entrants present models, and a nice varied mix they were. A couple of All Australian variants, a Demon, a Ramrod, a Les Heap Cyclone, an Aeroflyte Thunderstreak, a Nobler and a Jezebel, a vintage style model of unclear heritage but certainly of the correct atmosphere.

The flying kicked off with a couple of competent flights by Robin Hiern and Ken Maier, then David Nobes putting in his usual excellent performance - until he got a little out of step during the overhead eights and the resultant unintended "landing" saw the Ramrod suffer considerable damage...

The event continued with good flying by Derek Pickard and David Lacey (perhaps hampered by deciding to fly the cute Australian Cyclone biplane rather than his "foreign" Jamison Special) mixed with "exciting" flying by Harry Bailey - the Jezebel looks the part, being a small, typically English, basic model but is a bit jumpy so perhaps not well suited to attempts at precision aerobatics? Harry does not usually fly "stunt" events so was always on the back foot but he battled on to put in a brave show even if some of the manoeuvres were hard to decipher...

Gary Whitbourn had also decided to join the fun with his All Australian even though he never intended to fly the full pattern, and then we were treated to a an impressive showing by Murray Wilson. Flying a Nobler through a pattern he had not practised (or even knew before the day) he showed that a good model flown by a good pilot is always a competitive combination.

A second round was offered by the event judge (Reeve Marsh) and most competitors took up the option to hopefully improve their score, but there was no catching Murray.

Monty Tyrrell Classic Stunt

The Monty Tyrrell Classic Stunt event is another of the club's marquee events to honour another of the greats. This is run to the standard MAAA Classic Stunt rules.

Five competitors fronted up, with Ken Maier deciding to fly a Pentland-designed Spitfire, Murray Wilson again exercising the Nobler and the others flying models built by luminaries such as Ken Taylor (Derek Pickard's Phoenician and Reeve Marsh's Shark 45) and Doug Grinham (Harry's Lew McFarland Dolphin).

The wind had strengthened a bit through the day but it was still clear and warm. Only one round was flown and again Murray demonstrated his skills and the capability of the Nobler to head the field. The Elfin 2.5 in Ken's Spitfire lost its tune about halfway through the pattern but the others had few problems, other than remembering all the manoeuvres and actually flying them well! Despite that, everyone was happy to be part of a great day. Many thanks to Robin Hiern for stepping in to judge this event.