Originally Posted by
Ninthace
As for landing in unusual spots at Halton, my cross country check ride involved recovering from unusual attitudes and extreme ridge scratching before finally crossing the canal and spot landing on the volleyball pitch, all with a covered panel. But you tell the young people today ...
Sounds fun - the trip I was talking about was when I was on the staff of 613 GS,I already knew I was in trouble on that trip as our then CO Sqn Ldr 'Jacko' was parked up in the layby up on the tring road (he used to 'keep an eye' on us sometimes when he was not on duty
) - we were absolutely verboten to use the ridge/bowl in ATC gliders at that time
.
I had to do a x country 'field' landing into a very small area whilst flying in zimbabwe,I was flying a Skylark 3b - of course with excellent airbrakes but it was a cracking day - my pleas to leave it until early evening fell on deaf ears,I even tried again whilst airborne when I told them on the radio that I was climbing in a thermal with the airbrakes fully open
.But no - I had to do it - I had the devil of a job losing height on the downwind and base legs to get into the 'postage stamp' but I managed to stop just short of the far marker (the area was just off the airfield in a roughish patch of scrub) - they said ''you only just scraped in'' - I replied that it was a very unsuitable time of day to do it and if they had tried it with somebody less experienced they probably would have ended up with a broken glider.Gliders out there were like gold dust due to lack of foreign currency.