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. By doing this, you spend less time overall in the heavy sink that surrounds thermals. The video from 0:32 shows this, with an initial pull up into lift, but then lowering the nose again quite quickly after passing the core of the thermal.
In this particular case, the pull up is fairly prolonged because of the high glider performance. The pilot also accelerated again quite quickly, as the area of lift was small.
It’s a common error for beginners to only put speed back on well after they have left the lift. To fix this, start paying attention to what is happening when leaving lift – and focus on learning to anticipate when the lift is about to finish. This is the point at which you should have begun accelerating away. It’s better to accelerate out earlier rather than too late.
Ailsa McMillan 