Members' area

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)

Well 2025 was a pretty mega year for gliding conditions in our area. Many days in the summer with high cloudbases and strong thermals. Although we don't want a repeat of the drought, can we have the same again for 2026? The picture here is from Saturday 3rd January showing a busy launch point in fine but breezy conditions.

Once the car club had finished on the runway, and after derigging the K23 to take to the Minch show, we managed to get set up with the help of our small willing team, and started about 11am.

Early conditions were good, several members were able to use the street that had set up overhead up to 3,000ft, one member converted to the K13 solo and the ODC having a couple of great flights.

Flying stopped at lunchtime due to a large shower, the photos contrasting with the great day a few minutes earlier. Watching the weather radar let us time the next period of flying for a couple of hours, getting the rest of the flying list done, before sheltering for another shower and drying off the gliders afterwards as it cleared to put them away.

The Minch show team reported a lot of interest and sales of TLs were positive. Thanks to Adrian Giles and team who kindly gave time and promoted the Club there.

All in all, a good day.

Nice view from above the clouds.

Another of our pilots gets to practice a real field landing for the first time. Only 20 miles away so not too far for a crew and the trailer to drive and pick up glider and pilot.