This weekend at the dropzone, we have been hosting official BPA instructors courses for new AFF and Tandem instructors. The course has just been completed and many congratulations must go to:

AFF

• Richard Head
• Duncan Cockburn (Cobi)
• Karen Bain

Tandem

There was fun for everyone to be had at Hibaldstow this weekend. Dan Parker and Fraser Smith from the BLT's were on hand to run a freefly scrambles competition. Sadly, the weather was not on their side, so the planned competition did not take place. Instead, all the competitors came together and formed an 8-way group. They did 2 fantastic jumps, which will help prepare some of them for the forthcoming head down record warm-up weekend on the 19th to 20th May.

Did you know that today is the 100th anniversary of the creation of the Royal Flying Corps? Why is that significant in the world of parachuting and skydiving?

Skydive Hibaldstow is one the UK's most forward thinking dropzones. To that end, we would like to announce our first mobile phone application dedicated to keeping you up-to-date with all the latest news and events at your favourite dz!

The application at the moment only works with Google Android's platform, so sadly all you IPhone owners will have to wait until it is vetted by the Apple powers to be.

Many congratulations goes to both Karen Bain and James Swallow on being elected to the British Parachute Association council for 2012. For those of you who don't know them too well:

In years past, the 10-way Speed Frostbite Friendly competition has really earned its name with seriously cold weather. This year however, the forecast was pretty good with mild temperatures. Stu Ferguson our resident events manager and load organiser decided to bring in a new format with the introduction of a 2nd competition, the 5-way Speed for the lower experienced teams.

Many thanks to the 5 team captains who decided  to lead their fearless competitiors - Simon Cathrine, Jo Hawley, Blyth Davies, Matt Lancaster and Ant Hill / Stu.

So onto the scores:

It's October and it's been warm, so it came as quite a suprise this weekend when the heating suddenly turned off and the thermals came out.

It was windy too but that wasn't going to stop some amazing formation loads with Simon Cathrine.

28 skydivers visited the DZ just for a chance to participate in First Time Formations and every one of them got a chance to be part of a safe group for multi plane skydives.

Special shout out to the Cat Lees who with less that 90 jumps was a participant in a Hib 28-way.

Organising a vertical UK headdown record is no easy job. For a start, the working time compared to formation skydiving is around a third less. There are also less skydivers capable of building such a formation and last year, Hibaldstow sponsored team the Bad Lieutenant's managed to organise a fantastic 22-way.

A number of training weekends had been organised in the run up to this weekend and a pool of around 40 freeflyers came together. Some spent the Wednesday to Friday of the week getting some last minutre training in.

After a huge weekend in 4-way, the DZ once again came alive, for the second of our nationals weekends - The 8-way, Artistic and Speed championships.

The eyes of the nation this year were split over two categories - the huge battle between the Brit Chicks 8 and Microclim8 in the senior 8-way, and between Volare and Kinetic in the Freefly A discipline.

Despite a valiant battle, the Brit Chick just lost out, even with a stunning 11.9 average score to Microclim8 by a total of 12 points. Next year girls!

The first weekend of the British FS National Championships was attended by a record number of 55 4-way teams plus 3 VFS teams. This makes it bigger than the US Nationals.