While Char is off enjoying herself in Amsterdam I've been keeping myself busy and I thought I'd share my most amazing experience this weekend. I completed my first ever cross-country glider flight, and achieved my silver distance award - the major step towards a full glider licence. Silver distance is a flight to another airfield (or just a field!) of more than 50km in a straight line. It sounds quite easy, but the challenge of going outside of gliding range of the local airfield and heading off into the blue yonder takes quite a leap of faith in your own ability!
View Silver Distance in a larger map
Fortunately all went well and conditions were perfect - extremely rare in October! Enstone airfield was set as the goal and I set off with another new pilot, James, both of us flying single seater gliders. Time flew by as I fought my way upwards in the thermals and connected with a 'cloud street' - a long line of cloud with bits of lift all the way along it. Fortunately the 'street' was lined up the way I wanted to go and so I could zoom along at 60-70kts (100-120km/h) and before I knew it my home airfield in Dunstable was well out of sight - and reach... It was quite psychologically liberating to give up on going home - whatever happened I was 'landing out' now, as to prove you've covered the specified distance you have to land and get people to sign a form.
View Silver Distance in a larger map
Fortunately all went well and conditions were perfect - extremely rare in October! Enstone airfield was set as the goal and I set off with another new pilot, James, both of us flying single seater gliders. Time flew by as I fought my way upwards in the thermals and connected with a 'cloud street' - a long line of cloud with bits of lift all the way along it. Fortunately the 'street' was lined up the way I wanted to go and so I could zoom along at 60-70kts (100-120km/h) and before I knew it my home airfield in Dunstable was well out of sight - and reach... It was quite psychologically liberating to give up on going home - whatever happened I was 'landing out' now, as to prove you've covered the specified distance you have to land and get people to sign a form.
So with nothing to do but press on I carried on flying west until Bicester gliding field came into view - this would be a useful landing point if all went wrong but wasn't far enough to count as silver distance so I couldn't stop now.
After a scary patch of sink which had me plummeting out of the sky at more than 600 ft/min (12km/h straight down), I hit an amazing cloudstreet with one climb touching 1000ft/min (20km/h straight up!) for a few moments - which is as high as the instrument can measure! As I was close to the cloud here (the 'cloud base') I started being sucked up into the cloud itself. Despite accelerating to almost 130km/h I was still going up so to stay out of the cloud I had to open the airbrake lever and was soon in sight of the ground again - phew!
Enstone was now visible on the horizon and I had lots of height, so it was an easy glide to get there. I reached it with 2000ft still to spare so spent a while flying over it and choosing the best spot to land on. After rolling to a stop and climbing out of the glider, I looked around to see James on approach into the same strip! So I gave him a cheer and ran over to meet him after rolling to a stop - what an achievement! We were both on a real high...
Here I am with a big grin on my face! James' glider is in the background behind mine. If you look at the sky you can even make out the lines of cloud which provided me with all the energy to travel 60km across the country with no engine...
Fortunately Enstone is a friendly club and a kindly instructor gave us both a tow back with his motor-glider and I was home in time to join the others in the bar for a celebration drink. Everyone was quite astonished that we had managed to get our silver in October - normally it's only possible to do at the height of summer. As we were watching, a hot air balloon came in low and landed on our field in the setting sun - quite a sight and a great end to the day.
5 comments:
That's amazing! I'm glad I didn't know about all those scary technicalities or indeed that you were flying! The timing was certainly on your side, the weather's going to be dull and rainy for days now!
The weather's cetartainly miserable now. Don't worry, they weren't actually dangerous events. The biggest worry was ending up in a farmers field short of the required distance. Unfortunately a couple of people actually damaged the club gliders doing field landings on their silver distance badges this year. So we've had some of them out of action for ages. Usually through poor field selection and poor landing technique...
Congratulations!! You did a good job and wrote very well too. I could feel your excitement from your expressions.
I bet you're all eager to come fly in the blue, blue NZ sky :).
Yay Dave!! Super pilot!! Wish I could have been there with you, but with you on your way to a silver I might be next time?
Yes I'm definitely looking forwards to New Zealand flying - most of the world record glider pilots fly in New Zealand. They have flights logged of over 2000km in a day! Makes my 50km seem pretty poor in comparison!
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