This week is a great week for gliding, by April standards. Each of the little fluffy clouds you’re seeing are at the top of a thermal, so we’re getting lovely long flights. Come along and try it!
Everyone is achieving new milestones in their gliding journeys. Some have converted to new types of glider, others have achieved their 50km cross-country “silver” distance.
What did I achieve? With one single flight I ticked off:
- Flying over my house and being waved at by the kids (in Great Shelford)
- Flying over my old house (in Fulbourn)
- Flying over my friends’ house (in Swaffham Bulbeck)
- Flying for five hours (!)
The first hour of this flight was a lovely tour of Cambridge. It’s only in the past few weeks I’ve had the courage to speak to Cambridge air traffic control, which was obviously a pre-requisite to flying east over or near the town.
The big squiggle to the top left is after I did my Cambridge tour, just messing around in the thermals for a few hours.
Highlights of the tour:
- A great view of the Mullard Radio Telescope (where they discovered pulsars)
- Seeing some fens (they look very different from above)
- Thermalling above the recycling centre at Waterbeach where I took my kids on a school trip years ago
- Nerding out over all the long-closed railway lines
- Seeing how different things look from above. In the local fields near where I live there is a line of yellow where the crops have apparently been sprayed with some herbicide. This is uninteresting from the ground but from above it looked like a big yellow stripe directing me exactly where to fly.
I would love to say I got amazing photos around Cambridge. But, I didn’t. It was a hazy day which meant that the photos would have been terrible, but more importantly, I needed full concentration to look out for other aircraft in the murk. One hazy snap is all I got, and that was back near the gliding club.
After five hours of concentration, I was ready to land! I slept well…
