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Progress made: moving to Junior glider

The end of the mountain soaring training course arrived. I roughly flew some 25 hours in six flying days, my mountain flying technique was sharpened a lot, I enjoyed the most beautiful sights of this part of the Alps a person can dream of and I had a very good time !

Regis Kuntz gave me during yesterday’s morning briefing the Junior sailplane of the club. “The SZD-Junior is a glassfibre glider designed and built in Poland by PZL Bielsko. It has a fixed undercarriage, 15m wingspan and a glide ratio of 35:1. Its easy handling make it a good early solo glider, it is suitable for cross country flights and is a favourite for Silver distance attempts.”

I used to fly on more sophisticated sailplanes in my youth such as the ASW-19 (in which I made my first 5 hour flight back in 1981 in Belgium – air cadets), but as I did not practice this sport enough in the last decades I have to start working my way up again. 

Junior sailplane AAPCA F-CJEF

I made my first two flights with the Junior, allowing me  to familiarize myself with this sailplane. It is a spacious glider, I like to fly it.

I’m looking forward to start making overland flights with this glider later this spring.

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Soaring briefing Fayence France

The airfield of Fayence-Tourrettes (LFMF) benefits of more than 300 flying days a year, which is quite exceptional. If you like to rent a sailplane (glider) for the day, you need to make sure that you express your intentions to the chiefpilot, Regis Kunz, at 9am. He puts all demands together and distributes the planes. At 9.30 am there’s a detailed weather briefing which is always well attended, last week there were sometimes more than 50 people present. It is the daily mass for the pilots.


The three sites the chief pilot presents are:
2) Meteociel : detailed forecast per city
3) Meteo Parapente : The chief pilot, Regis Kunz, runs the audience through a detailed prevision of all the places pilots may like to attend on that particular day. What I very much like about these charts, that one gets an indication of cloud basis per hour per place…really amazing stuff

meteociel 
This weather briefing takes some 20 minutes. Afterwards, batteries and parachutes are collected and pilots go to the hangard to collect and prepare their sailplanes.