Dartmoor Gliding Society Club News: Dartmoor Gliding News-Saturday 8th October 2022

With just a light southerly drift forecast and seemingly clear skies, there was hope that today would indeed turn out to be as good as RASP was predicting. In the event there were lots of thermals, a sea breeze front ( which cut the soaring off at 4pm after passing overhead and providing lots of entertainment for the local soaring gliders.

The day kicked off with what is arguably the most important flights of the day with recently qualified Basic Instructor Phil Hardwick flying his acceptance flights with CFI Rick Wiles which went without a hitch and now means that Phil can operate as a Basic Instructor at Brentor. Well done Phil.

New BI Phil being congratulated by Rick

Of course, there is no such thing as a free lunch and lots of our trainees were attracted to this day which gave instructor Mike Jardine a very full book indeed which he worked through with a smile the whole day. Thankyou Mike and thankyou club members for your patience. We also had 2 One Day Courses, George O'Connor, an ex power pilot wascflown by me and Adrian Mawson was flown by Scratch (Dene Hitchen).

Scratch with Adrian

New member Matthew Stone had a couple of familiarisation flights with me
before flying with Mike

Junior member Ella Barlow managed a 33minute soaring flight with Mike

And what of the soaring. Well the cloud base never got very high. It was a little variable but 2400ft above the airfield (3200 ft above sea level) was about it. Too low for a cross country. Well nobody told Richard Roberts ( Discus ) who promptly flew an out and return to North Hill, a flight of 138km in just under 2 hours ( total flight time 2:04 ).

This is what Richard had to say.

The sky looked awesome today permitting a flight of 138km in just under 2hours. #lovewhereyoulive from Dartmoor Gliding to Devon and Somerset Gliding and back. In October!!! A great day.

Richards track

Looks fairly low over the moor but the cloud street was working

Approaching the far side of Dartmoor

The view south was hazy

The Twin Astir stayed in it's hangar today, but Malcolm had this to say

An hours soaring flight in the K-8 yesterday shuttling back and forth between Milton Abbott and Cudliptown with cloudbase rising from 2.200' - 2,600' agl. Flight data downloaded from the onboard Flarm, which picked up several gliders and powered aircraft flying nearby.

Data from the K8 flarm

John Allan flew the one of the K8s as well. These are his recollections

Took a flight in K8 GDK, picked up a reasonable thermal off the wire, and had one of the K13's join me a few minutes later underneath as they came off the second cable - this gradually increased in strength to between 5-8knots up at cloud base. Then headed over towards Tavistock, where there seemed to be a nice looking cloud street. Then later went back north towards Brentor, and picked up another street heading out over towards the ranges.

Taken from around 3200ft QNH
I think, mostly cloud base around there was about 2600-2800ft QFE.

Other notable flights today were Rick Wiles ( Std Cirrus) 2:39, Phil Hardwick ( DG300 ) 2:26 and Gavin Short ( K8 FXB with only a mechanical vario) 2:21. The K13's were not left out with several good soaring flights the lengths of which were controlled by their training commitments.