Vintage Kiwi Rally, Greytown Soaring Centre

VINTAGE KIWI RALLY

(or whiskers on display)

This year Vintage Kiwi decided to hold its Annual National Rally at Papawai, Greytown, in support of the Wellington Gliding Club’s move there from Paraparaumu and of course to support the formation of the new Greytown Soaring Centre at the site.

The original Bicknell farm site, which is also the home of

Gliding Wairarapa, is now owned by the local council. The airfield section is leased back to the Greytown Soaring Centre which at this stage comprises the Gliding Wairarapa and Wellington Gliding clubs. However, it is still a working farm where stock control is successfully managed around the flying operations of the day. The original main runway is 03 – 21, but a new cross vector, 29 – 11, has been since developed. The club operates a new Sky launch winch which was imported from the UK. With some 2 km of runway available, it has been possible to achieve a ‘Silver C height gain’ before one pulls the release at the top of the launch. For the rally a 160 HP Super Cub was also used, loaned to us by the Upper Valley Gliding Club.

New friends were made. Some arrived straight from a wedding whilst others came by plane and train.

Being a farm environment the runways were well grassed but were rough under foot in a number of places but where the main operations were carried out, the runway was relatively smooth. As time moves on, I have no doubt that the overall airfield will be knocked into shape and become a very spectacular site. However care needed to be taken when moving sailplanes from the picketing area to the main operational launching site on 03 – 21, as we had to negotiate a narrow culvert.

On the plus side a lot of good flying was done. In conjunction

with Vintage Kiwi's arrival, the Wellington Gliding Club ran a successful ‘Task Week’. The Vintage Kiwis group consisted of two Schleicher KA6cr, one Slingsby Dart 17R, two Standard Libelles, one Open Libelle, one Schleicher KA8, one DG101 and a HP18. The local Wairarapa Gliding Club also operate an ASK13 which looked right at home mingling with the visitors. It was also a bit of an unintentional Glasflugel rally with five Libelles flying.

The airspace requirements are minimal at 9,500 QNH as far south as Cape Palliser and as far north as the northern sector of Mount Bruce. With today's over regulated airspace, this is a great chunk of the available airspace to play in.

The weather was fine with a couple of 35°C days which were energy sapping. In fact, one day the locals gave up at 2.00 pm, shutting down the winch due to heat exhaustion with the tow plane carrying on until everyone had launched. It was even hot in the air, but you quickly cooled down after climbing through 5,000 feet or so (either by running the sea breeze over the East Coast or just the end result of a good thermal). Both the Tararua and Rimutaka ranges got ‘discovered’ by a number of the Vintage Kiwi sailplanes with only one land out. Russell Jones out landed in the VK Syndicate KA8 – LE and had to prise his crew from a wine trail activity. Such is life.

The Rally was a great success. Everyone partook of some good flying, good food [the on airfield BBQs by the local club now have to be classed as ‘World Famous in NZ’], some great beer and good interclub camaraderie. Our many thanks to the Wellington Gliding Club, Gliding Wairarapa and the Greytown Soaring Centre for being our hosts, and the Upper Valley Gliding Club for allowing us the use of their tow plane as not everyone is a winching pilot. The joint effort by all of these clubs to help and make our Vintage Kiwi Rally work as well as it did has to be commended. Interclub cooperation that you rarely see these days made the Vintage Kiwi team feel very positive about this new Soaring Centre’s future.