I came, I soar, I went.

I missed out on last years Task Week by becoming Bronze/Cross Country qualified about three days after it had finished, so I was looking forward to competing in this years 'friendly' competition. I had the week booked off work, I had a glider booked for the full week, and the weather looked as though it might have been a little better than it had last year too. Having sat in on a couple of last years briefings for the tasks, there were often 'smaller' versions for pilots competing with a bronze badge. I joked that I hadn't actually had my paperwork back yet confirming full silver, but no, I would have to compete on an equal footing to everyone else - maybe not even that, since several of them were using self-sustaining gliders, and had the option of an engine if they got into trouble. Task week has a basic scoring system that involves taking distance and speed points from a valid flight uploaded to OLC; and then adding a series of bonuses for other achieveme...

We're lucky to have a modern, high performance club fleet at the YGC - and those of us not yet fortunate enough to have our own glider, or a share in one are spoilt with a choice of either Discus or  DG-303 to go and have an adventure in. As you would correctly imagine, this system doesn't work so well on the good days. I arrived on the airfield at 8:30am intending claim the Discus for later in the day. Normally, nobody is around at that time - but this was going to be a good day (we have a had a few quite recently). To my shock, the hangar doors were already open (and thus, so was the flying list) and to my disappointment, both aircraft had been claimed for cross countries - even the Astir had names next to it.  With one two-seater out of action due to a split tail wheel, and another away at a competition, the very idea of taking the DG-500 and flying it solo was also a non-starter. What to do on a fine Saturday then. Wait in the clubhouse to see whether any o...

Thanks to some Yorkshire wave and a stroke of complete luck with regards to take off time and release point, I smashed Silver height earlier in the year without really having set out to do so, and so my journey to completing my Silver badge in 2018 officially began. (In case you feel that was cheating, I have now also completed a 4000' climb in thermals, we seem to be experiencing a strong summer of high cloud bases, when there are actually clouds!)  Duration came next, and as I explained before - I made it difficult for myself but managed to hang on to a deteriorating ridge just long enough. All that remained was the distance claim - and frankly, this was the one I was most  looking forward to. After over 100 hours of local soaring, I wanted to go and explore - but let's not get ahead of ourselves, I wanted to do it on a day that was sensible. When I first started researching things - Market Weighton seemed like the task to do; 51km away and an option to land at ...

Five hour duration. This is the one I've least been looking forward to. It's not that there's anything wrong with flying a glider for five hours, because after all we fly because it's great fun (and because we're massive children who are fortunate enough to get to play with the best toys). It's just that five hours is a long time and with gliding one poor decision could see you back on the deck at any point; but equally, a series of perfectly executed decisions could do the same if the weather doesn't co-operate for a full flying day (and we are talking about a hill site in Northern England). Since there's a currently a few of us that need to tick this one off in the near future, there have been many conversations in the bar around strategy and we have largely agreed on the principle that the best way to do it would be on a good soaring day and involving a suitably sized cross country task, so as to keep the mind occupied on other things than clock w...

The gliding season in the UK seems to be just about getting underway after a long, dull winter where not much could happen - even at our 7-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year club, most pilots have struggled to get flights in due to the conditions. My plan for the year is to go for the Silver badge ( got my height gain a few weeks ago ) and get some cross country kilometres under my belt. With the latter in mind, I helped to organise our club's participation in the Yorkshire Inter-Club League held at Burn Gliding Club, where a fellow pilot and I took our club's Astir CS-77 to see what we could achieve. Thursday The first thing we did was to go down to Burn on the Thursday for some site checks; we know how to fly, but the vast majority (ie, all bar about 3) of my flying has been from the same airfield where the local surroundings are now etched into my brain - making local navigation and planned arrivals into circuits quite routine. Burn has a long, thin tarmac runway which i...

Just time to catch up on this weekend before I disappear off on a weeks 'real' (non-gliding) holiday. I spent both Saturday and Sunday at the airfield, with a weather forecast that looked usable on both days. As it turned out, the forecast was a little bit backwards. Saturday Saturday looked like if anything were to happen, it would probably be after lunch and it would probably be thermal soaring. Glider pilots are optimists and also want to be high up on the flying list, so I arrived as I normally do, for the morning briefing. What followed was toasted fruit loaf and a cup of tea, whilst the two-seater fleet got going providing trial flights and lessons under a cloudless blue sky with relatively poor visibility, the likely result of an inversion that was keeping the warm air (and smog layer) trapped under a cooler layer above. At times, there were bands of strange grey cloud that appeared 'creased' - not the smooth wave type that we all want to be near...

It's been a while since I posted an update. This winter has been so bad that barely any flying has taken place at all, and it's much less available when you only have weekends to do it (it's really not worth using leave days from work!). We've had rain (lots of it), snow, wind (generally in the wrong direction) and thick, grey cloud cover that seems to have lasted for weeks at a time made even worse when your launch point is almost 1000' above sea level to start with. In January and February last year I'd clocked up around 20 launches - but by the same time in 2018, that number was just 2 or 3, with no real wave to speak of (because of the easterly winds that temporarily displaced our favoured and prevailing south-westerlies) and a lot of damp drizzle dissuaded anyone from their grand ideas of becoming airborne. In the UK, most gliding clubs operate due to varying amounts of goodwill from their membership - doing everything from launching, log keeping, o...