Dartmoor Gliding News-Sunday 20th December 2015

Yesterday's blog closed with the hope that we would be able to fly today. Well, the answer would have been 'yes' (but only if we had a tarmac'ed runway) for, in the afternoon (as the panorama by Ed Borlase shows) there were some promising looking cumulus (and associated rainbows) which, had we been able to get into the air, would have made for interesting soaring. Sadly, however, the grass was so soft that we had to put the risk to our gliders first and, particularly after some heavy showers in the morning, we decided that today was 'Look after your airfield (by not using it), day'. But what if we had a tarmac'ed runway – now there's an aspiration...

In the afternoon it was flyable – if only we had a tarmac’ed runway...
So what to do? Well, after a short teach-in about the Circuit, approach speeds and Rules of the Air, Dave Downton decided to maintain currency, at least on the simulator, by setting the new instrument display to work, which is of great benefit (you can actually see what the instruments are showing).

Dave Downton flies the simulator with the new instrument display shown to good effect
(it doesn’t prevent you crashing into the trees, though..!)
Roger Appleboom and Ed Borlase turned their attention to the steps of the launchpoint, where the non-slip treads (ie. chicken wire netting) had definitely seen better days and deserved replacement in order to be ready for (the shapely ankles of) our visitors next year. In fact, this rapidly metamorphosed into a fantasy about the club's pantomime for the 2016 season - “She Stoops So Low..!” (geddit?) in which the casting got as far the Dame/Widow/Witch (a certain prominent male member) and a few one-liners (like that one, but worse) that are not repeatable in a family blog... Oh, and we restocked the log pile for the Wednesday crew.

Roger Appleboom and Ed Borlase work on the non-slip treads for the launchpoint steps.
The finished article.
Looking ahead to Wednesday we are very grateful to Bob Sansom for allowing us to use his K-8 whilst ours is having its fin post repaired, so a team of Schleicher-savvy members will be needed to rig it and, at the very least, get it into the hangar, if flying is not possible. Many thanks, Bob.

Steve

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