David Williamson on his old record flight from the dyke

Top picture shows Canterbury from 4500', looking north, with the cathedral, top left, picked out by sunshine.



It was a warm and wet night in the city.The noise of cars swishing past lay far below, outside the blacked-out window of a smoke-filled room. In a single pool of light in the middle of the room a group of burly figures in sharp suits were gathered round a table. The silence was broken by the fluttering sound of a large moth's wings against the green glass lampshade. Swiftly, one of the men pulled a .44 Magnum from under his jacket and blasted the insect into the surrounding darkness. "Aw," a sad looking man exclaimed. "What'da ya do dat for, boss?""He was enjoying his flying too much," the marksman barked back. " Now listen up. Thoseguys down at the BHPA are trying to muscle in on our territory on the lower east side and I say that we let 'em take it.""But boss, da CAA have controlled dat area for years," the sad man interjected. "Look what happened when we let da Nigerians into Wales an' da aluminium started to hit the streets.""Yeah. Sure, it was like a battlefield to start with but they've pulled out now an' it's all quiet again. Anyways, the Cross-Channel route is just a dark alley that no one wants to go down... only to find Belgium at the other end. Take a look at the balance sheet - It's showing less returns than a kamikaze alrbase.""OK boss, me an' da boys is right behind you. We'll pull out of Kent for good."

And so, early In 1993, Manston Cross-Channel SRZ was removed, making it legal to fly north of Deal and beat Michel Carnet's six-year-old record, flying east from Devil's Dyke. The furthest point you can get to is North Foreland, the other side of RAF Manston. Fellow Southern Club flier Rod Lees said he'd been up there and that the coastline was pretty inhospitable, so I consulted the OS map and saw that there is a golf course which affords plenty of landing possibilities.
When you've used all your allocation of sick days up for the year to go flying, you have a problem with cross-countries: you dare not fly too far away in case you can't get back home in time for the night shift. Sunday August 28th, 1994 was a Bank Holiday weekend and I didn't have to go into work that night. I hadn't seen weather forecast and arrived at the Dyke at 9am to see cumulus already beginning to form. There had been cumulus out over the sea all night and they were still there. The forecast must have said that it was going to be blown out as there was no-one else there apart from Trevor Ackroyd, another Southern pilot, who arrived at 10am, by which time I was rigged. It was blowing a moderate to fresh westerly and looking good. Cloud base was a bit low, but it was still early. I hadn't seen a single bird thermalling (could it have been that the drift was too strong to make it attractive to them?). I thought that it would overdevelop but Trevor, who hadn't seen a forecast either, said that it wouldn't. In fact there was a low over the Hebrides that was quickly pulling cold, dry air down from Alaska and over Ireland and the south of England from a westerly direction.I took off on my Santana SRC at 11.00am into weak lift and flew straight over to Newtimber. At 11.15 I took a rough thermal up to 2,200' but it stopped there and I pulled back into wind toNewtimber. It was getting very rough in the ther­mals; at one point I was rolled about 90 degrees before I even had time to put a correction in. Trevor took off and came over to join me. We more or less stayed at opposite ends of the ridge. He said later that the first thermal he flew through made him go weightless six times! We got loads of thermals, but nothing that we managed to climb in until 11.58 when we went over the back, topping out at 2,400ft. This was no better than the one that I'd had 45 minutes earlier, but what the heck!I was drifting back quickly in a 0-2 up when Trevor came towards me from the south and slotted in fifty feet below. I was just maintaining height but Trevor was gradually getting lower and headed off downwind towards Lewes. He got no lift all the way and landed at Offham. I stuck with my zero until it became sink and then headed due south, at 90' to the direction Trevor had gone,towards a sharply defined sea-breeze front on the coast. I found another 0-2 up thermal long before I got to the sea breeze and stayed with that, drifting over Lewes. I noted that it had taken less than 25 minutes to get to Lewes and, as the lift was better, I started working my way northwards and passed just north of Ringmer. There was a sailplane a long way to the south which looked like it was steaming along the sea breeze.Having drifted over Heathfield town I started working my way north again, but as I passed the lakes at Ticehurst. I thought: "This is silly. I'm keeping myself under the 3,500' limit (london TMA) and cloudbase is now way up high." So I drifted with a good thermal, flying a wide circle round the edge of it to keep down to 3,500'. This was hard work; being on the edge made the thermal tip me away from it all the time, so I went for the easier technique for keeping low: fly away from the core in an upwind direction (the upwind edge always seems to have the sharpest definition between lift and sink). As you enter sink, start counting whilst maintaining your heading. After eight seconds turn 180 degrees and head down­wind, counting ten seconds. If you are not in the lift again, search both ways along a line at 90 degrees to the downwind direction and you should find it.Climb until back at the airspace limit and repeat. It's a lot less strenuous on the arms!Once over the boundary I climbed up to 5,500' over Tenterden and was on the north edge of a 1 1/2-mile-wide cloud street which had the sea breeze on its south side. From just north of Woodchurch I could see (visibility in the air was 40 miles) that the street was absolutely solid all the way to Dover! It was tempting to follow this as there would have been little chance of going down, but it would have meant turning north. after Dover and having no option to work weak thermals as I would have been getting blown out to sea. I decided to try to pass Ashford on the west side to give me a chance of breaking the Dyke record. I left this decision too late; leaving the lift and heading north to the next cloud gave me a north-easterly drift, which meant that I got under the cloud directly over Ashford - just what I was trying to avoid!The cloud dissolved quickly and I was in 8 - 10 down sink, as is usual over Ashford. I made a downwind dive towards the M20 but there was no visible sign of habitation on the other side, or of bridges back across the motorway. I changed to a north-westerly heading, partly into wind,which gave me a glide which would cross the motorway for a landing at Kennington where I could see a cricket match taking place. I was down to less than 600ft agl and just approaching the motorway when the right wing kicked up. I got chucked around going in and out of strong lift, but gained height! Drifting over a sewage farm also gave me a good incentive not lose the thermal.",
I centred the thermal and climbed up to 5,500ft, heading north to get round Canterbury. There were two clouds in between the cloud streets and I only lost 2,000ft getting across. The city was in shadow apart from one ray of sun­light shining directly on the cathedral, making it stand out beautifully. Looking south I could see Calais about 33 miles away. I was by now well north of Deal with North Foreland clearly in sight ten miles away. Clouds were everywhere, with a base at over 6,000ft. I headed north, drifting over the edge of Manston ATZ but never getting lower than 4,000ft. I crossed three miles of sea to arrive just east of Ramsgate at 3,000ft and hopped from thermal to thermal past Broadstairs. I could see the golf course on the coast at North Foreland! I thought: "Hang on a minute, it's only taken three hours to fly 80 miles! The wind drift could be quite strong... I may have less penetration than Dave Matthews after a night on the Newcastle Brown!" So before getting to the coast I turned into wind and checked my drift. It was all right - I wasn't going backwards - so I carried on and turned into wind over the golf course at 3,000ft.A thermal came through and took me back up to 3,500ft while I was S-turning over the landing field. A black and yellow Cessna made three fairly close passes to have a look at me, and I descended to land by the 14th tee at 3.00pm in a 20-23mph wind. 79.74 miles! Fortunately the Captain Digby, across the road from the 7th tee, stays open until 5.00pm on Sundays...It had been a very interesting flight, covering the ground very quickly and involving 40 miles of crosswind flying, but I think that I've been going on about it a bit too much: the other day a bloke in the pub threatened to nut me and throw me out of the window if I didn't stop talking about it. I wouldn't have minded, but he only went in there to sell the War Cry!