Dartmoor Gliding Society Club News: Silver "C" in One Glorious Flight

11 April 2014

How I achieved Silver distance, Silver Height, Silver Duration and 100km Diploma (part 1), in one flight

After planning this trip with syndicate partner some 6 weeks ago, getting good weather was always a gamble, even in April. However, with a very promising forecast for Friday, Ged and I decided to leave early at 6.15am from Dartmoor to reach Aston Down ( AST ) for just after 10am. The sky was promising and Ged very kindly agreed to let me have the glider to try for my Silver legs (50KM and / or 5 hour duration and /or 1000 metre hight gain) if possible. I decided on an OR task to Enstone (54km) and back (54K) to make sure of the 50km I needed for the silver task. Map marked with my route and GPS programmed, and at 12:45 took a winch launch from the smooth tarmac runway and skylaunch winch combination to 1200ft height. I headed for a good cloud, was awarded with my first good climb to cloudbase, which at that time was only about 3000ft QNH.

With a good looking sky on my track of 060, I had no hesitation to continue the task which by now had already triggered a ‘start task’ in my GPS, giving me a turn point goal at 54KM out. Apart from making sure to avoid airspace, the route out to my turn point was not too difficult – each cloud I headed for worked, and blue gaps offered good reachable clouds to entice crossings.

Crossing blue gaps (with good clouds to reach) on route about 20km to turn point at Enstone

By the time I reached my turn point (after a slow cross wind 1hr 20min), cloudbase had now increased to 4200QNH.

Rounding the turn point Enstone aerodrome

The route back took a little more work and caution as I had bigger blue gaps to cross with the better looking and out of bound sky towards airspace at RAF Brize Norton. So checking the chart, GPS and compass all corresponded decided on an accurate route that would take me very close to one corner of the boxed airspace. When I reached this corner that I needed to round, I was now down to my low of 2100QNH (about 1500QFE), but with good fields ahead offering good ground sources of lift AND potential landing options if that proved fateful, I decided to push on. I needed another climb to get back so I worked very hard working every little beep before finally being rewarded with the best climb of the flight that elevated me at 6-8kts (and occasionally over 10kts) back to base at the now higher 4500ft. This was what I needed, half way up the climb the glider guider beeped to inform me that I was now above final glide back to AST.

After gliding back to AST at 60-70kts, I still arrived high with a still good looking sky and gliders everywhere to help with the decision now to go for my 5 hours. I had been in the air for 2.5 hours, had plenty of water in my camel back, a packet of biscuits, so only one option really – to park myself over a large town like Stroud and work every bit of lift to stay high, as I knew that 5 hours would take me to just before 6pm and towns would continue to work till late.

For the next two hours, I boated about over Stroud, Gloucester, and Nympsfield in a line of energy that kept me high (occasionally over 5100ft QNH to get my silver height), until I reached 5 hours of airtime, before air-braking down to land next to the club house just after 6pm.

A beautiful flight, and lucky to be at the right place at the right time.