Cost of gliding
From my days on a gliding club committee, we always calculated the cost of a trial lesson to ensure there was no "profit" margin over and above normal membership costs. Thus a typical winch trial lesson might be two launches + 1 month's membership. If annual membership is £480, £40 of the cost is membership fees, and the remainder the launch cost, say £15, total £55.
Calculating hourly costs is not as simple as with power flying, because the launch cost is fixed regardless of flight time. I'm currently averaging about £15 per hour in launch costs this year, but that ignores my club membership and the cost of owning my own glider.
I used to reckon that flying a club glider for 30 hours per year, once solo and soaring, cost me in total about £1,250 in today's money, or £40-ish per hour. But it's not a linear rate. If as sole owner of a glider I fly only 10 hours per year, that will cost me over £200 per hour. If I fly 100 hours, it will only cost me about £30 per hour. If I make 200 hours (no chance because of work) I'll be below £20 per hour. This is all aerotow launching - winch launching is cheaper if you are good at picking the right time to launch and are good at connecting with that first thermal.
To give a real example, in 2006-7 I flew around 50 hours at a total cost of about £2,000, including the running costs of owning the glider. If I'd syndicated the glider with one other person and flown the same number of hours, my costs would have dropped to around £1,500.
If you really wanted to fly on the cheap, you could buy an older wooden glider for £1,500, but your annual insurance, maintenance costs and club membership would still be around £1k. 20 winch launches would cost you around £350 edit: correction, £150], and if you picked your days and soared from each flight you could do 100 hours - £13.50 [edit: correction, £11.50] per hour. I'd be impressed if anyone got lower than this.
The bottom line is that gliding is comparatively cheap (per hour) if you do enough of it. Or more accurately, for a budget over £1,500 p.a. you can do more hours than flying power.
Last edited by ProfChrisReed; 4th Jun 2009 at 15:29.