South Downs Challenge

The Sussex Wing Adventure Training Team (SWATT) organises an annual South Downs Challenge.

Cadets who enter have to complete a navigation exercise in 8 hours or less across the South Downs working in teams from the same squadron. This was, originally, done at night but because of safety concerns with staff being on the go for over 24 hours and then driving cadets home afterwards, is now carried out in daylight and late evening hours. The location is variable and is chosen to give all parts of the county a fair spread of travelling times.

Up to 200 cadets take up the challenge each year and approximately 50% successfully complete it.

Checkpoints and safety points are set up at intervals across the route and these are manned by staff members. All cadets are required to book in at each checkpoint and radio operators there transmit information back to a Command and Control centre manned by members of the Communications Training Team. Here, a record is kept of the location of every cadet and members of staff are directed to locations along the route. ComCen also oversees any emergency action required should there be an accident or a team is overdue at a checkpoint.

In 2012 the location will be the Charlton Forest and the challenge will have an entirely new format.  The arrangements of routes, checkpoints and timings is such that no team can follow another round the course and succeed.  There will also be much more emphasis on leadership and team work as well as putting the responsibility for accurate navigation entirely on the team members. 

Teams will first have to choose which of two levels they will enter at and will than have to plan their route round a course only revealed to them on arrival.  At each stage they will have to make decisions about which checkpoints they will visit and in what order.  These choices will have to take into account timings and the abilities of all the team's members.  Planning by the teams will be fundamental; to their success; fitness still, however, underlies everything.

This year's Challenge takes place on
Saturday July 7th 2012