Towplane BWY skin maintenance and infrastructure inspection. It looks in great shape and will be ready for the start of the season. The work is been performed by Kovachik at the Burlington Airport. While still cold due to the last front, on Sunday January 14th the ground and weather conditions allowed for over 20 flights at SOSA.
Thanks to Luke for the great pictures. Yesterday, Dave, Mark V., and others organized a training session followed by a radio operator license exam.
There was a 1 hour "lecture" followed by the exam, resulting in 13 pilots successfully receiving the certificate. Thanks to Don Kuehn for helping us in this initiative. For those who missed this training, you can follow up with Mark Voysey, who is now an approved examiner. Study guide: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/smt-gst.nsf/vwapj/ric21-upd-oct-2011.pdf/$FILE/ric21-upd-oct-2011.pdf The 2017 Precision Landing Contest was a great success. We flew almost 80 flights, the operation running all day long. We had a great day. Here are the official results by class: Un-licensed pilots:
Licensed pilots:
The BBQ was also well attended and all the cooking was done by the Junior Team. They ran a very efficient dinner there was no waiting and everyone ate way too much. Well done guys! The club is donating all proceeds to the Junior Team fund to help them with insurance, bursaries, contest fees, etc. We all look forward to even more participants next year. Photos by Martin Brassard
As we move into a quieter part of the year, there are towpilots that have volunteered to be available most days throughout October.
The schedule is shown here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OFTLiFHjkTnbrpdFJI_jUK75OGjMNMPgCXqTCxk3z6c/edit#gid=1099502040 To avoid the situation where a towpilot arrives at SOSA and waits all day while no glider pilots come out to fly, the daily flying planner in freeflight will be used. If no one has posted to the daily flying planner before 8 am on a given day, then the towpilot is relieved of duty for that day and will not be at SOSA to tow. SOSA finished the 2017 soaring season with a strong September that raised our total distance recorded to over 44,000 km. This put us in third place in the club rankings behind Canadian Rockies and Montreal. It is great to see that we have the largest number of participating pilots (42) in Canada.
The graph shows that 2017 just passed 2013 in total km. Let’s hope that the fall flying holds strong for a few more weeks and that next year brings many cross country soaring days. With sunset occurring earlier each week, it is now time to call off Friday winching for the season.
As we move through the fall, we'll plan to start winching every Sunday starting in November and continue as long as the weather cooperates. For the third year in a row, Mark Voysey has led the Acceleration Week. And in spite of the weak weather we had all year, during almost 9 days (between Friday August 25th to the end of Sunday September 3rd) we saw:
- Flight numbers increased by 250 (including about 30 practice flights during the Provincial contest), representing almost 10% of the total flights this year. - One license and solo, and much progress for the four to six basic students and several more who partially joined in. - Flying from 9 to noon till sunset most days. - Thirty thousand linear feet of grass mown. - Two instructor instructional flights (Toronto Soaring and Cambridge [UK]). - Ten intro flights flown by Mark. General comments from the participants were very positive, from students that made significant progress in short time to the possibility to have daily flying experience, to the execution of flying tests Besides Mark himself, we must thank the other instructors, - esp. Rob Russell - who gave his students the support needed (Ray W., Chris W., Malcom, Bill, Joerg and others), the maint. team (including grass cutting), and all those who joined in or helped along not to mention our diligent and reliable tow pilots Jeff D and Robert et al. With such positive feedback and results, we look forward to the next Acceleration Week in 2018. Sad to say, with the days getting shorter, it is time to end Tuesday evening flying for the year. The four months always seem to rush by.
The weather has not cooperated as much as normal, but we did get some good flying in. Tuesday 12th. Will be the last for the season. Thanks to all involved. Towpilots ( Mostly Jeff), Students, and Instructors. On behalf of Tom, Sorin and me, Pat August had a quite a few good good soaring days so our year to date total km recorded on OLC has grown to 38,000 kms to almost reach the 5 year average of 2011-2015 (40,000 kms)
Compared to other clubs, we sit in third place behind Canadian Rockies and Montreal. Let’s hope for a good September to keep adding up the distance. If Harvey’s clouds would remain a little further south, it would help the weekend total with the provincials being held at SOSA. |
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