Highland Gliding Club Press Release

11th May 2007

 

With the flying season well under way it has been a busy month at Highland Gliding club at Easterton, Birnie.

The first week of April saw the arrival of the Ash 25, a high performance glider owned by the Scottish Gliding Association and made available to Scottish Gliding Clubs for certain periods during the year. The Ash 25 allows for advanced cross country training in a high performance machine. Good advantage was taken with some very successful flights.

During May members of the club will be competing in the Inter-Club League and we will play host during July for one leg of the competition. We have another training week scheduled in June and have introduced a new computer based logging system.

The first of our Ab-initio training weeks was held with two pupils who enjoyed 5 full days of flying and instruction covering all aspects of flying from theory of flight and safety inconjunction with hands on airtime.

Alan Nicholson has been appointed Tugmaster. Alan is a highly experienced pilot with 35 years flying experience, is a training Captain on 747's and CAA examiner and will complement the existing club expertise.

There have also been some notable cross country flights which have been added to the British Gliding Association National Points Ladder.

Stuart Naylor and Callum Reid flew the Duo Discus managing a 7½-hour flight clocking up an impressive 420kms, which saw them take in Pitlochry then up to Golspie and returning via Feshiebridge.

Robert Tait and Peter Goodfellow took the Grob Acro initially for advanced training and ended up completing 321kms in just over 4 hours. Their route took them to Ballater, Pitlochry and turning near Callander and returning via Dalwhinnie and Granton on Spey. At one point the lift looking at the logger trace, the Acro sustained a climb rate of 19.4 knots for over 1 minute.
So good were the flying conditions that a pilot John Williams from Portmoak Gliding Club achieved a flight of 1100kms, stretching from Jedburgh to Cape Wrath.

Individual club members achievements include Jim Marshall gaining his Silver C height at 12,800ft, Callum Reid completing an Hour flight for the first leg of his Bronze Badge and Peter Goodfellow completing a two hour flight for his Bronze Cross country endorsement.

Lastly European Legislation has caught up with us and the upper level airspace took a significant drop in height on March the 15th. It has come down from FL 245 (24,500ft) to FL 195 (19,500ft). We now have special areas overhead that are called TRA (G) which will allow us to climb as high as FL 270 (27,000ft). However, this is only open at weekends.