Happy New Year.
Great news on the runway project. As many of you may have already seen on the webcams, we made short work of laying out the new runway over the last couple of days. Many thanks to all those who turned up on the 2nd and 3rd to help put it together and lay it out. Once up and running, we were laying about 1m per minute! Today, Jim and I got the roller out and have rolled the ploughed section of runway to smooth out the tractor tyre marks. This has definitely helped. We also test rolled a spare section of matting and it will work nicely!
The next stage of the project is the rolling in of the material under the supervision of Trevor Archer who is coming up from Perfo to help make sure we get this crucial bit right. He will be with us first thing on Saturday so I hope to commence the rolling and aligning at 09:00 to get the most out of the day.
This part of the process will need a limited number of people working on it at any one time so we should be able to fly whilst this goes on if we have enough people. We will need a vibrating roller driver, 4 ground handlers for the Perfo to adjust positioning and clip it together and Geddes will be bringing his loader again to fill undulations with earth as we lay the mats. Ideally, we should be able to rotate people during the day so that they can fly if they wish.
I expect this work to take all weekend and maybe a bit more depending on how we get on. So, if you can come out and help, please do but do also come and fly!
Once rolled in, that will be the runway ready to use. so if all goes really well, we might be able to use it on Sunday!!!
That is not quite the end of the runway project though. We also need to complete the marking of the aerotow strip at the west end as well. We will have enough spare white tiles to make up Runway Numbers 08 and roll them in. We also have Bruces paving slabs to mark out the edges of the runway and will use the roller to smooth out the road crossing and area behind it. The paving slabs can be laid at any time but we only have the roller for a limited time so we will need to do the numbers and smoothing this weekend as well.
Nearly there, it will make a huge difference to the club once completed and make it safer for all of us.
Robert