I fly from Darlton; Gamston general aviation is on our doorstep virtually, we're almost in Doncaster's airspace and we have Scampton and Waddington in our back yard. What amazes me is that hole borers will still fly over the site at the minimum alt (2000 in our case) when we have flailing cables and all the other good stuff to bring down an aircraft lurking in the air. Of course it could be due to the fact that the A1 is on our doorstep as well. Please, please give glider sites a wide berth if possible, we are all on radio at our site but it's not much use when you hit that 'after take off thermal', pole into a steep turn and come face to face with Joe Cessna who is flying to the regs but not with any common. OK the onus is see and be seen but in my experience it seems to be me that does all the seeing and getting out of the way, there must be some kind of anti glider coating on light aircraft windscreens.
On a more general note, if the weather is anywhere near reasonable, expect gliders floating around up to 20 miles from the site depending on cloudbase not counting the ones that have decided to do a cross country which could be anywhere frankly. If you look at the proximity of gliding sites on a half mil you can see that on a reasonable day gliders could be all over the shop. Also if we have wave conditions we could be lurking around at FL200, we're not always between the clouds and the hard stuff.
Last edited by thing; 15th January 2011 at 21:13.