Tag Archive for racing

JWGC Day 4 Update

Some preliminary reports of land outs have been announced, but Both Devin and Boyd are still flying. Things are bluing out all around as the dry airmass from the west is moving into the contest area. Ethan and I are waiting for their return doing laundry and playing ping pong at the French house near…

JWGC Day 4 – The Race is On!

Racing fans! Yes! It has finally stopped raining and we are in the middle of our first contest day. Launching 81 gliders in two different classes took 1 hour and 49 minutes, with one aborted takeoff from club class. The tasks are 320km for the standards and 270km for club class. There are a handful…

JWGC Contest Day 2 – Scrubbed

Hello Racing Fans, Contest day 2 of the Junior World Gliding Championships has been scrubbed. Today we are under the influence of a strong trough spinning off of the low pressure system centered north of the English Channel. We awoke to much colder temperatures and high winds out of the west – directly across the…

Updated edition of Charlie Spratt’s book

In 2004, the National Soaring Museum published ‘See ‘Ya at the Airport’, a collection of Charlie Spratt’s stories about his life, youth, people that influenced him, soaring contests he attended, and CD’d, and other soaring events, all soaked in his love for the sport. Now that Charlie is gone, this book has become more than…

The Future of Contest Soaring: Classes and Rules

Once upon a time, there was one class: the open class. Standard class came about as a very sensible idea to create a class with good performance, but simple operation and limited cost, in an era when open‐class wingspans, costs and complexity were increasing, and their handling became more difficult.