Thursday 28th February: Day 1
On Thursday the 28th of February at 10:30am, 12 students left Welbeck College for Austria. We travelled from Welbeck College to Gatwick airport after a brief first period. It was a short journey that felt longer due to anticipation and excitement especially as some of the group had not flown on a plane for a number of years.
After a bit of duty free shopping and eating we boarded the flight. On arriving in Austria we were met by a group of students from the Austrian equivalent of Welbeck and were taken back by coach to the military academy. The coach was quite rowdy with a buzzing atmosphere as our trip had began and we were keen to get to know our Austrian counterparts however by the time we arrived at the college the exhaustion after a long day travelling had kicked in and we went straight to sleep, preparing for the activities ahead.
Friday March 1st: Day 2
We wasted no time the next morning with a 6am start on the day's activities. The first of which was familiarising ourselves with the Austrian assault rifle and Glock pistols. We were taken to a classroom where we were given a rudimentary level of knowledge of how to operate them. After this lesson we were taken to the range to test our shooting skills. With the rifles we shot at a target 200 m away and our scores were recorded, we also had 6 attempts to hit the 2 figures either side of the target.
With the glocks we shot at a human shaped target 10m away. We made our way back to the military academy for lunch, and we were given a tour of the school by the Austrian students. We had a go at their entirely concrete obstacle course and were given a brief tour of TherMilAk (their Austrian equivalent of Sandhurst, adjacent to the Academy), before bed.
