Monthly Archives: June 2021

My Club Safety Committee spent a lot of time this week talking about "Situational Awareness" and the loss of it. But what exactly is "Situational Awareness" ("SA") anyway?  How do you get it?  How do you lose it? How do you know if you have lost it? How do you get it back? It is an elusive matter and one that is hard to write about.  The part of our brain that helps us maintain multi-faceted

A necessary skill of soaring is being able to thermal efficiently in the company of other gliders, sometimes there is only one thermal within your glide range, otherwise, the alternative is to land. Quite often on blue days, the best thermals will be marked by others, if you are to avoid these thermals, you’ll give yourself a handicap.  This article aims to introduce how I enter a thermal with

A few weeks ago I got back to my home airport after a long XC flight that got pretty difficult at the end with clouds knitting together into a solid (and lowering) overcast and little remaining sunlight on the ground. And, on getting back I was “rewarded” by the need to jump into a tow plane to aero retrieve 2 guys who landed out at different airports on their way back. Before I left I remarked to

Typically when we start with our cross-country flying, we feel like we need to take every thermal, this habit is often a hard one to break. Even pilots who are quite experienced still want to stop and climb in thermals that are less than optimum. We have to be selective when it comes to increasing our overall achieved cross-country speeds. Take the below graph, it’s for a typical 15m ballasted racing