EAC Touzim Arrivals

Graham Hill and I arrived by car at Touzim today. Tom Cassells managed to get here a couple of days ago in his 232. Nick Onn initially set-out with Tom but had some problems with his Sukhoi 26 on route and landed in Holland. Despite valiant efforts to fix his aircraft with a lot of help from friendly locals, he had to leave his aeroplane in Holland and flew to Prague on a scheduled airline. Castor Fantoba who will be flying at the contest has very generously offered to let Nick fly his Sukhoi in the contest. This is the second time that the Spanish team have lent an aircraft to the British team to allow one of our pilots to compete at a Championships and we are very grateful for this very sporting gesture by Castor. Eric Vazeille has also arrived via Prague and is going to train the team over the next few days ahead of the Championships. Gerald Cooper decided to train at an airfield on-route in Germany because of bad weather at the contest site. He is a 45 minute flight away from Touzim and we expect him to arrive here early tomorrow morning.

There has been very little (if any) practice at the contest site so far, due to poor weather (wind, rain, low cloud) and the grass runway is a little wet/muddy, so the organisers are trying to minimise movements on it ahead of the contest. The weather forecast for tomorrow (Wed) is a bit better and it is hoped that the runway will have dried out overnight.

Touzim is a nice airfield is very nice and the local people are very friendly. We are staying in a hotel about 20 minutes drive from the airfield.

Tom is scheduled for a training slot at 0800 tomorrow morning and then we hope to get two training slots for each pilot (Tom, Gerald, Nick and Eric) tomorrow.

The first briefing and opening ceremony are scheduled for the 2nd September, so tomorrow is the last full practice day that has been scheduled - so I suspect its going to be busy at the airfield!

More news tomorrow.

Some photos of the airfield, hangars and clubroom are shown below.