Members' area

The BGA has published the 2026 Safe Start booklet which can be viewed and downloaded here:
gliding.co.uk

Fog and then low cloud stopped flying today. However we used the time to change a wheel on the cable tow car and to rig the Club's ASK23.

Unfortunately, due to the increasing wind strength, today's flying was cancelled.

The last day of February brought fine weather for a change. The wind started off WNW with it forecast to change to WSW, so runway 26 was the obvious choice. Despite interruptions from a cable break, which needed the dynema rope to be spliced in 2 places, and a rain shower, we managed 31 launches in 6 hours of activity. 7 student pilots were flown, 2 winter refreshers, a site check for a visiting pilot and 2 air experience flights also, along with a few solo flights. We look forward to more of this in March.

A rare pleasant flying day for the Wednesday Flyers. Runway 20 with no significant cross-wind and the only thing that delayed our start was the Class D airspace that was NOTAMed until 10:45. Cloudbase was only 900' to begin with but soon went up so that winch launches could go to full height. Winter refreshers, SPL 2 year recency flights and a conversion on to the Sport Vega were notable, and a few "Descents on Tow" behind Eurofox EZ.

Today the club hosted the second of our regional Go Gliding sessions for local schools. We had about 30 young people visit the club to be given a tour of the hangar, a go in one of our gliding simulators and some hands-on STEM experiments covering how a wing works and how gliders fly without an engine. For a change the weather was dry and we even had a visit from a very pretty Tiger Moth.

The weather was finally flyable with a fairly stiff westerly blowing but NO RAIN! Flying today was on runway 26 by winch, using winch B. Photo (c) Paul Lewis.

Wed 18th to Fri 20th Feb, 10 of our Cadets and Junior members attended 3 training days organised by our CFI. This was supposed to give them some much needed flying as so much of the winter has been unflyable so far. Unfortunately the "weather gods" refused to play along and we had another 3 non-flying days. However our cadets had some interesting lectures and activities including a visit to the glider workshop and a demonstration of how to do the Daily Inspection on a K13. We also did some sessions on the club's single seat simulator and a second sim provided by Adrian.

Tuesday 10th Feb, half a dozen members took a Gliding Simulator to Airbus in Bristol to be part of a STEM activity day for Schools in the area. The day was organised by Go Gliding along with Airbus and the students had a tour of part of the factory followed by a go on the simulators (ours and a BGA sim) with some STEM science activities on the theme of flight.

Well, to say the weather has been rubbish so far is an understatement. However a few nice days did appear in January and there've been one or tow in February as well. The picture here is from 14th Feb - a nice Valentine's Day. (Copyright Paul Lewis)