Doing The Gap.
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I don't often attempt this flight - it is too hard!
At Burnley the airspace goes down to 3500ft for the next 55km. Now 3500ft is not too difficult in the low flatlands, but on this route the ground is high, there are many hills and large moors to cross. Much of the land is over 1000ft and some over 1500ft. Little altitude is left to play in.
To make it worse many of the valleys are narrow and steep with lots of houses/trees/roads/etc, so for a safe landing spot you can only glide if you have enough height to cross to the next moor.
Which is why it is not just I, no one else attempts this flight much!
Locals always refer to "the gap". After 30km of the 3500ft you have to fly though a 5km wide gap in the airspace near Huddersfield. Either side of the gap the airspace is even lower. After you get through the gap there is another 25km of 3500ft before the reward of open airspace.
On this day conditions were not ideal to attempt this flight; mostly blue, light-ish winds and climbs to somewhere above 4000ft.
RASP showed good air moving along the track of the flight, from Pendle to Huddersfield and on to Sheffield. The plan was to stay in the good air all day…
Although mostly blue, there were lots of thermals about and the flight was probably a little easier than I expected. There was never any time to relax, but that made it a fun flight. I've never looked at the ground so much, always working out where I can land and where the next climb may come from.
Last time I did this flight I bombed 8km after I got to open airspace, it was a fairly rubbish XC day and I only got through the gap due an epic line of convergence. I landed when the convergence ended (you always need an excuse for landing! )
So this time on route I told myself not to get over excited, not to relax when I got to open airspace. I told myself to get high and carry on, there was another three hours in the day… But it happened again. I bombed a few km after I got to open airspace. Doh! It was never guna be a big flight as the wind was so light down there, but it would have been nice to have carried on.
Maybe I wet my knickers getting to open airspace and cocked-up, but I think I flew into a more stable airmass, there was not a single cloud after Huddersfield and it had been increasingly easy to stay out of the 3500 as the thermals started to fizzle. Ironically the stable air worked less well as the ground got lower. RASP predicted this, I think I was always ahead of the best air, 90 minutes after I landed nice clouds reached me. Maybe I should have left Pendle later!
Of course the real goal is not to get through the gap, the goal is to get to open airspace and continue… 330km down to the Essex coast!
I think only two others have got through the gap and into open airspace; Phil Colbert has done it twice and Michael Endacott once. The best flight was Phil's from 2014, he got to Newark-on-Trent for 140km.
Back in the day we only ever tried this flight when the weather was iffy and we could not be bothered to travel somewhere better. I was with Phil the day he did his 140k, but I chose to land at Burnley as the clouds were massive and there was rain all round us.
In the last ten years I've only attempted the gap twice and I've done it both times, so maybe on modern wings it is not as hard as we all think. What can we achieve on this route on a good day? I will be trying it again soon…