| Flight details: | I met up in Fiesch with Robert Smith and Will Woodhead, English pilots who've spent a lot of time flying in the Fiesch area. A very good day was forecast; in fact, it was slow to get going, with plenty of pilots bombing out until after midday. But from then on it worked beautifully. Robert later described it as "a weak Fiesch day", and if so, you can keep the strong ones! The climbs were plentiful and quite smooth, so that you could exit a thermal painlessly when you had enough height; and the transitions weren't sinky. I'd been warned that it might be a Grimselschlanger day, when the cold wind comes down from the glacier into the Goms valley, so after reaching Munster, I turned for home. (I'd also mistakenly thought that the local glider airfield had a 5 nm exclusion zone below 1950 metres, but in fact it's much smaller -- and in any case, there was no risk of getting lower than about 2500.)
I later found that Robert had flown over the Grimsel pass, but not quite made it to his home at Andermatt. Another locally-based British pilot, Quentin King, flew over 100k to Bellinzona in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. On my return leg, it was easy to reach 3500 metres without really trying, so I could probably have made more of the day, but caution is always good when flying in a new area. Leonardo says it was 39k as a turnpoint flight, or 34 as a flat triangle, but to me it seemed like an out-and-return -- and, more importantly, a lot of fun. |
