Saturday evening competition

Objective: fly around the Crimea and do touch and go landings on all airports in the shortest time.

Well, this was a very difficult task. Professional pilots forgot their landing gear or crashed at take-off, it was disaster :-) If you ever hear your captain speaking and he announces himself as Bas Jansen, you must know this is the Crazy Captain Chaos and he is not to be trusted (forgot his gear in this race!). Four pilots survived, and Quax had the fastest time (and cleanest style) and won a fantastic jacket (not the model!).

Later that evening, well, let's just say I returned at night at 03:00 and found plenty of opportunity to fight Adam Banks (in his reincarnation of The Bitch) and get frustrated by the evil but deadly laughter of my Unit 13 comrade Medved. You got it, a wee bit of Quake to top off an excellent day (and night). Officer on deck at 08:30! Grrrrrr.

Sunday

There were still some prices left and Marek was completely in the mood... he wanted to see blood on the wall, Quake in the air. And he wanted a mission without landing involved, given the success of the previous evening :-) "Three years on the market and Flankerholics of world fame still can not bring the bird back," he fumed. Well, he briefed us to the following.

Mr. Headcase smells blood...

First of all, we had to fight our way to another base in teams of four, passing another base on the way. Independent CAP fighters defended those bases. Guns only. Teamplay. Radio's. And a stunning absence of Situational Awareness!! People passed each other, waving (WO I gallantry?) and continuing on their mission of killing others. And this despite well prepared tactics and stunning scenario's.

Incredible but useless tactics...

When team members survived at last they had to finish each other off. Well, captain Chaos had his revenge from the debacle of the night before, and ... Quax! His new won jacket gave him wings. So it was him up against Captain Chaos.

Click to continue

B1b from Flanker 2

In the H2H that followed all eyes were on two screens. Let's face it, it was not the best H2H ever, but fun it was. You see, everybody secretly thought it would be a wrap-up for Chaos and so did he. So after he delivered a nice load of lead in his opponent Quax (and we all imagined the christmas tree cockpit) he asked in the utter silence of the tension-filled room: "Want to do some formation flying Quax?"

We all shuddered with laughter, and the warning of "Stinger!" was lost in the crowd. Watch out, Chaos, he still has both his engines! What happened? Of course, Quax WON! He never gave up, fighting bitter and concentrated and not carried away by glory alone. Second prize for his table, a beautiful Academy model to match his jacket.

Image: Glorious Quax after his match against Chaos.

Then we fought a team effort to win The RNLVAF Award; a stunning hand-crafted wooden display model of our Beloved Sue.

Image of Sue here

It was a capture-the-flag scenario; land one plane at an enemy airbase in a 4 to 4 engagement. Again in teams of 8 pilots. Stinger's team ended up as the best team and will soon be portrayed on this site in full glory!!

That meant the end of the meet more or less. Some people had to start packing, having to travel long and far. It was over. It is sad to see everybody pack and leave, said Stinger with a tiny lumb in this throat. We all felt like that. It had been a fun, warm gathering of pilots, litterally from all over the world, sharing this silly hobby and devotion to Flanker. And really getting along so fine.

We had some light debrief beers in the Big Bear Bar, secretly thinking about a next Big Bear Meet. Making plans. What to improve, how to get it better. And we were just plain happy.

Read HERE what out guests had to say....