A lovely day’s gliding at Camden yesterday. In winter, despite the days being shorter and the sun lower in the sky, you can still find thermals – the bubbles of rising warm air that keep a glider aloft. But the soaring conditions don’t last long, they start about midday with a few weak thermals and are all over by 3pm.
So it was good to achieve a two-hour flight from Camden. There was scrappy lift at first, then some lovely puffy cumulus clouds with classic thermals beneath them, allowing me to climb up to 4,500 feet, near the base of the clouds, and set off to explore the local area.
I was flying the club’s Astir CS, a 15-metre span glider with retractable undercarriage. Other club members were also enjoying the conditions so at times I was circling in company with a couple of other gliders.
All the craft are fitted with an instrument called a Flarm. “FLARM® is an affordable, active and cooperative traffic and collision-warning system for general aviation and recreational flying.”
It combines a GPS with a radio transmitter to tell the pilot when another aircraft is nearby and give an indication of its relative direction and height. It’s very handy to supplement the pilot’s own lookout. On this short video of part of my flight you can see it as a ring of green lights on top of the dashboard. They turn red and buzz if you get close to another glider.
My video was shot in HD on a Panasonic Lumix compact camera (on permanent loan from Chris!) I was flying with one hand and holding the camera in the other, so it’s a bit shaky at times. Lots of glider pilots now have tiny GoPro cameras which they fix to the inside of the canopy on a suction mount to record their every move.
