Saint-Rambert d’Albon, on the holiday route!

Tour ULM14 July 20182 min read

Friday 22 July

The 21th edition of the Tour ULM has set up camp on the holiday route, beside the Nationale 7 halfway between Lyon and Valence, at Saint-Rambert d’Albon airfield. We are welcomed by the microlight club La Thine Air ULM and the aeroplane club Aéroclub d’Annonay. In aviation history, the town of Annonay is associated with the first flight of a paper balloon by the Montgolfier brothers on 4 June 1783, even though the historic site is not on the airfield, which lies in the heart of the Rhône valley. It is therefore a Tour firmly turned towards the South.

The Tour ULM is a well-oiled machine and regular readers of this blog know its main organisational principles. They are available in the press pack on the site. A few new things this year: the flight director is Louis Collardeau, well known to participants, a lifelong microlight pilot, president of the Rhône-Alpes Regional Committee and a member of the board. You can still follow the participants (in the GPS Tracking section), but this year there will be ten beacons! You will therefore see scribbles all over Provence, the Côte d’Azur, the Camargue, then Toulouse and the Auvergne volcanoes… Finally, we will make a film with Aerostar.tv, a fine one, we hope, which you will be able to see after the summer.

The weather is hot and stormy. Thunder, rain, and eight participants are missing at the start this Friday. They should join us later. Saturday will be about going around the storm while avoiding later instability. But the rest of the week, if we follow the main trends with caution, should not pose too many problems.

Each Tour is a new story, made of old hands and newcomers, habits and innovations. We will try to tell you all about it as well as we can in words and pictures.

Sébastien Perrot

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