SOSA

Bad weather this summer put a quite a damper on the club's flying. Nevertheless, we had quite a few achievements. Jan Zaremski and Rafael Nunes successfully passed their flight tests and have joined the ranks of licensed glider pilots; James Stang made it all the way to York Soaring to achieve the 50km badge and David Wu, Tim Wilson and Kareem Shehata had their first solos. 

Jacob Christie had a first on type in club's Junior (pictures below).

Congratulations everyone!

An early moon was visible during one of the evening training flights few weeks ago. Weekday training flights provide very good flying opportunities for students who can make it to club late in the afternoon. Training flights usually take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Wx permitting, but occasionally there are enough people to fly on other nights as well. Members can check club's Yahoo discussion group for updates.  

With rain and other misery in the forecast, SOSA Open House on June 5 almost was not. But Mother Nature took pity and gave us a half day window of flyable weather, visitors came in sufficient numbers to keep all our two seaters flying and enough members came out to lend a helping hand. 

Skies were unsettled producing amazing cloud shapes and colors. Skies were also very busy with all two seaters and both towplanes flying.

Our tireless tow pilots worked non stop towing intro rides as well as some student flights.

Instructors were busy flying with students, doing some intros as helping out on a flight line.

Andrew was official VIP for the day and got a lot of help from Spencer, Dave, Herrie and others.

James, John, Steve, Peter and others helped the duty crew to keep the flightline running smoothly and making sure that landed gliders did not have to wait for a long time.

Paul Fish and his crew kept visitors entertained and fed in the club house.

Big thank you to all club members who came out that day! Another big thank you to visitors who came and checked us out. And final thank you goes to Mother Nature for holding off rain and thunder till later that evening:

Vlada

The Weather Gods threw a (hopefully) last tantrum on Saturday May 16 with near freezing conditions, wind and low ceilings.  Still, enough brave souls showed up to keep the flight line humming with activity. Some activities included towing the towplane.

Two-seaters were doing instructional flights, some checkouts were happening and couple of private owners pulled out a club’s Junior to get back into a single seat flying after a long winter break. Most surprising of all was the decent lift under almost complete overcast that made flight durations close to an hour possible.

But that was not the end of Saturday as club held a social/ meeting event later in the evening to discuss where we were and where we would like to be in terms of membership, growth, fun and safety. I am sure there would be a separate report on that, but many thanks to those who organized the salads and other tasty snacks. Garlic bread and brownies were certainly well received.

The Gods then took pity on the gliding population and Sunday morning arrived with glorious blue skies and almost unlimited visibility. And that was really good news for club's aerobatic program as we were officially up and running. Scott opened the hangar doors just before 8am so the first acro flight could take off at 9am.  Poul and Vlada showed up right at 8am and DI’ed the Puchacz and ASK-21 and James Stang and Paul Fish joined later. All acro instructors were on hand too. Andrea did the towing for the acro program in a separate Pawnee, so that we won’t infringe on the non-acro flights that were towed by another Pawnee. Since this was the first acro flight of the season for most of us, the stomachs had to get used to G’s again and we could only do one flight each. However Scott and Joe had to do a couple of flights each. Apparently, Scott did not have enough acro for one day as he later took off in a One Design and we were treated to some incredible power aerobatics display.

As acro program was winding down for the day, the Cu started popping all over the airfield and strong lift was reported. A decent soaring day then ensued and lasted for a while until the East wind brought in the high overcast and cut the lift off.

But that was not all that happened this weekend. Mark Thompson paid us a visit in his RV-4 which looked awesome. Finally, a few SOSA pilots and our Citabria towplane were at Toronto Soaring, participating in a soaring contest. They had good Sunday too – for the results check the Sailplane Racing website and the scores from May 16.

Vlada