I do a lot of competition flying, and it seems most of my flights are either at comps, preparing for comps, or at the odd coaching week to help teach others. What I don’t do a lot of is ‘free flying’ in the peak season. The last time I got let loose doing that was […]
After looking through footage from the 2017 WA Women in Gliding Week, one clip in particular stood out as being useful for coaching. It starts at about 0:32 in the video above. When you’re slowing down to gain energy in the glide, you should always aim to get back to your cruise speed before leaving the lift. […]
From May until August I found myself on many airfields around Europe. Competing, crewing, relaxing, stressing, but always learning! Mostly, things went better than I’d ever imagined they would. […]
There are two main ways to calculate if you have reached a safe final glide. MacCready Theory – this requires many inputs, including your glider’s performance polar, your MacCready setting, wind info, how much water ballast is onboard, etc Required Glide Ratio – this is a pure geometric calculation using your height and distance to the finish point. […]
Flying this competition was something that Matt had first suggested three years ago. The basis of The Plan was that Matt would fly the cruise, and I would climb – playing to our strengths. This worked gloriously well at times, most notably over a 160km chase phase where we caught a small gaggle on the last day. But […]
Ailsa McMillan 