June at the Yorkshire Gliding Club

Editors’ Note: We welcome George Bowden as a Soaring Café author and correspondent. George is newsletter editor for the Yorkshire Gliding Club in the UK. George also flies an LS8t.

As an introduction, the Yorkshire Gliding Club (YGC) was formed in 1936 at Sutton Bank in North Yorkshire, from the amalgamation of a number of smaller local clubs. The hill top site, with a claim to have the best view in all of the UK, has authenticated records of gliding activity from 1906 and today boasts a well-established gliding club that operates all year round except on Christmas Day.

With a 5 two-seater, 5 single-seater fleet, including a Rotax Falke motor glider, a winch and 3 tugs, Sutton Bank offers hill, thermal and wave flying in a historic and beautiful part of the UK. This is the first of a regular monthly contribution to Soaring Café that will attempt to give a flavour of flying and activities at the site and covers the month of June 2012.

Despite June 2012 being the wettest in the UK since records began in 1910 and also the second dullest month on record with only 119.2 hours of sunshine, it was still a busy month at the YGC. The club hosted the National Rally of the Vintage Gliding Club, a week-long event from the 3rd to the 10th, the visitors and YGC members enjoying some good gliding that included 77 aerotows on the 4th, with thermal, hill and some weak wave lift during the week to satisfy all tastes. Vintage gliders always bring some colour to any gliding scene and the week at the YGC was no exception as the following photographs show.

Phil Lazenby, wearing a top hat in the following photograph as a forfeit for landing out in his Pegase, chaired the weekly briefings and award ceremonies, ably accompanied by Nick Gaunt, YGC President, seen on his right and CFI Andy Parish on his left.

The evening of Monday 4th also saw the site opened to the public for the lighting of a beacon, one of 4000 official beacons being lit nationwide to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. With runway 24 turned into a car park, some 1500-2000 people attended on a pleasant, if cool, evening, with many having a picnic on runway 20.

A busy June continued with the Northerns Regional UK gliding completion being held on the week beginning the 16th June. Four contest days resulted, the flying challenges comprising 105, 303, 260 and 173 km tasks. YGC Flying Director Dick Cole flying the club’s DG1000 with a variety of P2s, came 3rd with 2508 points, behind winner Graham Morris of the Bristol and Gloucester GC with 3041 points in his ASW 27 and 2nd placed John & Lemmy Tanner of the Deeside GG with 2994 points in their Duo Discus. A full social programme complemented the flying activities including an evening display of model aircraft incorporating a separately piloted model tug/ASW 27 combination aerotow.

Club and private owner flying was interspersed with a number of corporate days. On these, visitors from companies and organisations come to the club for a day’s gliding in both a real and virtual sense, the latter via the club’s simulator. A typical group, comprising medical doctors from the Accident and Emergency Departments of hospitals from within North and West Yorkshire is shown on the next photograph in front of three of the club’s four two seaters.

Apart from the cross country flying associated with the Northerns Regional gliding competition, the early part of the month saw Rob Bailey cross the Pennines in his ASG 29t to soar over the Lake District and witness a marked sea breeze front advancing inland from Morecombe Bay. Later in the month, George Rowden flew a 257 km task in his LS8t on a day when a number of pilots had to abandon longer tasks due to sea air incursion from the east coast. Nevertheless, five pilots logged almost 1200 km of cross country flying on the UK National Ladder run by the British Gliding Association.