Shalbourne Gliding – OLD WEBSITE
A friendly gliding club in Wiltshire
Good day today for many reasons.
Firstly John Douglass and Alex James both successfully gained their BI ratings after flying with Patrick Naegeli yesterday, well done to you both!
Two down three to go……
Secondly the MT hanger is finally taking shape 🙂
Great day at Shalbourne GC today. 53 flights, first solo by Tom Foale, Bronze theory test and Bronze flying test passed by Matt Beckett, Annual checks and P1 mutual checks completed by Nick Jelev, P1 mutual checks completed by Jeremy Knight and annual BI checks completed by Chris Bessent.
With the warm weather there were plenty of T shirts on show, lets hope 2019 is a great year for gliding.
Oh yes nearly forgot.
I also started Richard Dann’s instructor checks, unfortunately Richard encountered very strong sink at the wrong end of the airfield which weirdly coincided with a liberal (and firm!) application of full airbrake forcing him to land reciprocal. Richard tried his best to reduce the “sink” but to no avail 🙂
Seeing as access to the club on Saturday morning was a little tricky we hastily rescheduled the venue for the BI ground prep with Patrick Naegeli to the Plough instead.
Many thanks to Marian for opening the pub 1 1/2 hrs early and for keeping us plied with hot food and beer for the duration. I’m pleased to say that Patrick was happy with the prep work and all 5 prospective BI’s are now ready for the flying exercises. Just need some warmer weather!
During the morning we had a very large group of detectorists in the adjacent field down at the southern end of the airfield.
One of them , Tony Parsons from Brighton, approached me and mentioned that we was also a landscape painter and would take a few photos of us gliding with the aim of producing an oil painting from one of them, here is the result!
Those of you not on Facebook are really missing out on some really interesting posts about Shalbourne and gliding in general.
This is an example of what you will not normally see!