Dartmoor Gliding News - Saturday 14th March 2026.

Light northerly wind and the possibility of some thermal activity later encouraged a very good turn out this morning. The newly rolled airfield has become wet once again with this weeks rain, but it was decided to fly from the east end on the southside where to airfield is mostly dry. This will contain any damage and allow easy re-rolling.

The interesting sky from the launchpoint.

RASP was forecasting considerable thermals activity but this was somewhat over optimistic. There were 3 soaring flights in the Astir CS77. Best flight of the day was Andy Davey in his Libelle who ( at the 3rd attempt) managed to climb to cloud base and then escape to the better conditions to the north for a total flight time of 2hrs 22 minutes.  

There were some showers in the area

John Allen found a convergence in amongst the busy sky and ...

... he managed a few minutes play tim

Rick was kept busy in K13 FSD working through the training list. Our visitor today was Del Elsmore from Westward Ho!. Del is a member of the Appledore Lifeboat crew and enjoyed exploring gliding with me in K13FGR.

K13 on the launch

Del and I waiting to launch

Meanwhile, in the hangar there was a lot of work going on. After repositioning the club trailers we were able to move K13 CCY's fuselage into the K13 trailer along with K8 FXB's wings - I bet that will cause some head scratching in the future. K8 FXB fuselage and tailplane were moved into the green storage container while CCY.s canopy was moved into the clubhouse. K8 GDK was derigged placed in the hangar ready for it's annual inspection. In fact, by the end of the day, much of the tailplane and fuselage had been cleaned and inspected. We now expect to derig the Puchacz on Wednesday ready for it's return to the Navy which will make room of one of the Twin Astirs to join the fleet. In the workshop Colin completed the refitting of CCY's aileron and the closing up of the wing fabric. Paint is the next task.

The Puchacz waiting outside the hangar

A nice spring day.

Steve