The first Wednesday of October may have been the last decent thermic day of the season with thermals even drifting out over the English Channel. One of our pilots, Charles, soared along the South Down National Park and even soared for a mile or two out to sea and, from around 5,000ft,  took some great pictures of the South Coast of Worthing and Shoreham-by-Sea including the Rampion Wind Farm.

We all give our huge congratulations to Paul Fritche for being selected for the British Gliding team to represent GB in the FAI European Gliding Championships July 7-20th this year in Slovakia. News to many newer members but this isn’t the first time Paul has been selected. In 1998, Paul was selected for the club class Europeans, and for the same class in the World Championships in 2002. Pauls performance during the Worlds was impressive – his personal highlight was flying with the reigning world champion, Pete Masson and finishing 1st on one day and then 2nd on a day when Pete Masson was 1st –  so both Paul and we are all rather proud! So, well done Paul! …… and lets hope for third time lucky! Whatever the result, we’re still proud that a Southdown member has been selected.

It was with great pleasure that Dave Clews (right), on behalf of Southdown Gliding Club, gratefully accepted a cheque for £300 from Andy Tate (left) of AirACES specifically to help our cadet members with their flying training.  Our committee will soon be deciding specifically how to use this donation. In 2018, AirACES made a similar donation which was used to finance over 50 free winch launches for our cadet members. This was enormously beneficial to our cadets in their training of low-level handling, circuits and landings of gliders.

We have a great relationship with AirACES and they regularly visit in the summer for an organised day of gliding followed by a BBQ. They will be doing so again in August this year.

AirACES (www.airaces.org.uk) are probably the largest aviation talk society in the south of England and meet every month at Chichester. At each talk a raffle is held where the annual proceeds are split between two organisations – one of which must be for the benefit of youngsters interested in an aviation. Southdown GC are currently honoured to be that organisation.

…We do Groundschool!

Today, it was a pretty wet Wednesday but the regulars still turned up and waited for the rain to clear. The wait was put to good use with our pilots (students and qualified alike), helped by our instructors, revising a few points on navigation.