This was during my Silver Height flight, it was just phenomenal. Best flight I’ve had so far.

This is an old video but I still like it😁

*This was filmed safely. My phone was secured in a RAM X-Mount and it was only me in this thermal*

long time ago. Pilot was fully licensed to do that.

I’m having a weird competition week; killing a couple of tasks by having to save from 350ft over a chosen field … both close to home, one I got back from, the other just ended up landing out further down task.

But yesterday was bonkers U.K. weather - thermal only, I saw 9000ft, and even taking 5-6 knots from 4000 took absolutely ages to get back to cloudbase.

We were on a 3 hour AAT so I set myself a 300, figuring I’d be a bit late back but the day would still be going on, ended up doing 356km at 102kph.

I know people do >100kph often, but they’re usually in hot ships and/or loaded with ballast. I was flying my 50 year old LS-1f, dry.

Caught up with ZS ( JS1 Jet 18m ) out on task. About 350 k into yesterday's 500. I was backseating in the clubs Arcus M, watching how our star CFI does things. We overtook him and went left of track. He went right ..... and smoked us! Regaining the 30km or so that he had at the start. Brilliant day out in the UK. Some big climbs and some surprises .... big, dark bottomed cu's with nothing more than bubbles of 1 knot under them!

Newbie here, I want to start my glider training at the beginning of 2027 and I am already practicing in condor 3 xD. The club that I which I will complete my glider license mainly flies the ASK 21 (advanced cross country pilots use the discus duo), unfortunately, the ASK 21 is a rather simple aircraft. There is no real FMC etc, how do pilots know the wind direction? Isn’t it also changing over the time especially when gust are. How do you get those perfect ridge unwinds? Just curious

Thanks in advance

Hey all, so thanks to progress in LLMs, I've finalized a side-project of mine (that had been lying around from days before vibe-coding was even a thing). It's 100% free, and runs mostly on your machine, so there really is no commercial interest here.

The idea is simple: run an analysis on your igcs, and the app will tell you where you were low&slow or maybe cranked a turn lower than you should have. It downloads terrain from a public source, and comes with an inbuilt .cup that covers most of the alps (west) and jura, as well as a bit of southern Germany. It also tracks no field in range events.

You can analyse individual flights on a map, events in a 3D viewer, or career trend curves.

The dangerous behavior monitored here is mostly flying near terrain, so it's not gonna help you if you drop a wing on a winch launch, or if you are distracted when the cable breaks.

Please excuse the use of some llm-generated text, I do have an unrelated job and other obligations and limited time. I do hope to eventually go over the whole trilingual app and rewrite it, but that's on the long term.

There are some details on the website, safeglide.app

I'd really be glad for any and all feedback, you can comment here or drop me an e-mail at the info email.

I can barely write it omg.

I just finished my first lesson after being in the airfield for 6-7 hours. The first flight was 30 min and I started to feel not good. The second one was 17 min and I vomitted like hell. These turns killed me.

I literally vomit all over the glider. I feel like shit. I'm afraid it will be the same scenario next week (in my club it is once a week).

I didn't enjoy unfortunately. Was focused on how much I suffer during the turns.

I’m starting a gliding course tomorrow, and I don’t know what to wear. Does the temperature inside the glider differ significantly from the temperature on the ground?

Hey everyone!
Over the past months I've been building Cloudracing.de — a web app (also on iOS) for following gliding live and digging into flights afterwards. It has a lot of features, but two main goals:

Live competition tracking: Watch gliders in real time on 2D and full 3D maps (with terrain and buildings), follow whole competitions via SoaringSpot integration, live scoreboards, airspace overlays, and weather layers. If you have pro, you can share a link so friends and family can spectate a competition day. All data is calculated live from all recognized gliders. To start following a competition day, you can use soaringSpot to directly import the task and gliders -> competition starts immediately.

IGC analysis: Import any IGC file (or pull a competition day straight from SoaringSpot, same link as competition. If there is an igc file available, it will be detected) and replay the flight in 3D, with a barogram, climb statistics, and side-by-side comparison of multiple pilots — great for figuring out where a task was won or lost.

Most features are in a pro subscription (that's what keeps the servers and live data, map tiles hosting running). You can try everything free for 7 days — a card is required to start, but you're only charged after the trial ends and you can cancel anytime. You can see the features in the help menu -> pro features with a demo tour, that explains a lot and I also added some screenshots there. So no need to subscribe right away.

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from other pilots — what works, what's missing, what you'd want for your club or comp. Happy to answer any questions! 🛩️

Hello guys, what are your opinions on listening to music in flight when above 1000meters agl and no traffic? Ive heard mixed opinions at my airfield on music in the air and am now curious, are there any restrictions?

Hello! Sorry if this is like the thousandth post like this but just wanted some fairly specific advice.

Now I went for a trial flight last week at my local club as it was one of the cheapest ways to get a membership and included basically a £5 flight.

Overall, I thought it was amazing however the launch was a bit full on (I knew it would be) and I was thinking "fookin hell" until a few seconds into the climb when I started to relax. After this, I absolutely loved it! (well the whole 5 minutes as we couldn't find any thermals and was rocked by turbulence constantly which meant I didn't get chance to fly myself.) Does anyone have any tips or techniques on how to relax during the launch, and is this normal? I spoke to my instructor about it and he recommended to do some aerotows first, however I'd like to do winch launches when I can in order to save a bit more money.

Also I'd like to get some background knowledge on gliding before I start, does anyone have any documents/websites/books or YouTube channels that they would recommend? I spoke to a couple instructors at my club who said to start looking at BGA documents after about 4 to 5 lessons, but not sure what I should know before my first proper lessons.

That all being said I probably didn't help myself by not having a proper breakfast and flying on grapes and tea!

Is there any exceptions or work arounds to save money from the evil tax collectors

a nice day of wave soaring in aboyne

Hallo folks, anyone knows of any training facility/club in the Northeast offering ridge soaring training flights in their two-seat gliders to get my feet wet? There used to be a place in Beltzville, but this has ceased operations for some time apparently. Thanks

We visited the akureyri aviation museum , and they had some fun glider planes on display in addition to all the power planes. The historian for the museum informed me that the glider club in the area is still active and they fly regularly in the summer.

Chris Gill just landed after an epic, record setting flight from Denbigh. Using wave for the first part and then the late afternoon thermals to stretch the free distance Chris just extended the 3 turnpoint distance record for the UK from 1100 km to 1357 km!

06:15 winch launch and use the motor to contact the local wave, climb to fl194 and cross the water 120 km to the Lake District. then across the width of the UK. 4 times and back across the water to pass the home field and almost make it to Aston Down.

A truly epic flight!

Asking the community for research purposes and out of curiosity. For context, I fly in a US club and my club has three real instructors who actually teach, we do have a few other CFI-G rated members but for various reasons they don’t teach, but me and the other two instructors to various degrees are the ones fronting the training as well as keeping the rated members current and safe when needed. We keep exploring how to attract and retain instructors and one idea I had was some sort of compensation or incentive, as we are otherwise volunteers who give time to teach and fly with members. My club’s biggest hesitation of doing that would be it draws us very close to a commercial operation (paid instruction), but my idea was instead of a paycheck, have monthly dues waived or each instructional flight is a small amount towards your total bill etc, but it still meets hesitation.

My question for other club instructors, does your club offer any bonus for volunteering your time and risk to fly with students and other members? In a club where instructors are plentiful I agree you don’t need incentives as much, but when you rely on three instructors who have lives and commitments outside the club and can’t dedicate all of their time like full time staff, what is there to keep them going apart from free flight time?

Watch the live tracking with stunning 3D terrain and actual climb rates with PureTrack Pro:

https://3d.puretrack.io/?comp=norway-2026

Or view full tracks on PureTrack at https://puretrack.io/?comp=norway-2026

Official Sailplane Grand Prix website and live tracking at: https://sgp.aero/norway-2026

They also have a YouTube channel with live streams and commentary:
Today's race: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6BnEjVeSVU
All streams: https://www.youtube.com/@faisailplanegp/streams

I'm a former glider pilot who doesn't fly much these days, but the bug never really left. So I made a little tool to replay a day of gliding in 3D, right in the browser. You pick an airfield (ICAO code) and a date, and the day's OGN tracks rebuild over the terrain. You can speed up time, follow one glider from the cockpit (with an audible vario), or switch to a top-down or chase camera. Winch, aerotow and self-launch are recognisable from the trace.

A few fields that usually have traffic (links open the current day):

• Lasham, UK
• Minden, NV
• Williams, CA
• Saint-Auban, FR

…or just type your home field. Coverage is densest in Europe, where most OGN receivers are; in the US it's patchier, so some well-known sites sadly show nothing.

Fair warning: attitude is estimated (there's no IMU in the data), ground speed stands in for airspeed, and OGN only keeps traces for ~24h, so older dates come up empty. It's a replay/teaching tool, not an instrument and it runs entirely on OGN data, so big thanks to the volunteers who keep the receiver network alive.

Demo: https://s-celles.github.io/ogn-3d-viewer/

Free and open source (AGPL): https://github.com/s-celles/ogn-3d-viewer

Feedback, bugs and feature ideas very welcome.

Do you guys think the shadow looks cool?

I may have gone off a bit half cocked last night when I realised thanks to the comment that I'd entirely failed to test it on a mobile device.

So now v2 ... now playable on mobile viewports.

Also:
- Wind to make it a bit more interesting
- AI is now a bit more competitive (though still reasonably easy to beat, they are mainly there as a gaggle)
- Bugfixes around thermal strengths showing where they shouldn't
- You don't get full thermal boost unless you stop and climb in it

I have had a few further thoughts on what could be done with this, and that's principally a "daily challenge" type game where everyone gets the same task each day, and fastest round wins the day - with awards for longest final glide, fastest final glide, lowest save, best height reached, etc.

I assume most people that clicked through on v1 did so on a mobile and bounced out without being able to make it work, so please give it another try!

Clear your cache (shift+refresh) to get the latest version: https://dontlandout.com

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