Besides being a course day Wednesday is a club day so we saw and introduced ourselves to some more club members. Again we started the day with a low cloud base. This gave our instructors a chance to to do some ground schooling in the club hut. Our group started with looking at launch failures at various points in the launch cycle. We had time to cover some basic airmanship before we could get out and help move the gliders into position. We all felt more confident about collision avoidance and the rules governing airspace, particularly around Dunkeswell.
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| Gliders ready (Mike Sloggett) |
It was my time to fly first with James and we managed three flights before lunch. The repetition of tasks is really helping to embed the necessary control, almost to the point where some operations in flight are becoming second nature. My two colleagues helped out with ground tasks.
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| Clouds lowering (Mike Sloggett) |
After lunch Tim got a flight but then the wind direction veered and we needed to move the launch line. While this was going on the cloud came down again followed by some light drizzle and no more flights were undertaken. Time for tea and a brief chat among ourselves before Mike Sloggett suggested we went into the briefing room and work out circuit planning between us. A very useful exercise. Mike gave us ten minutes and then took us through the different key points on the plan we drew and added some we had not thought of. He followed up with a discussion of pre-flight planning, getting us to recall information James had given us over the last couple of days. Again very useful.
- Jim Binning
