in fact there is a German joke that Slingsby meant to build a Grunau Baby but used inches instead of centimetres and it came out a bit big!
astir 8, that's a great story.
The following is not Air Cadets, but I hope it is of interest. My first glider flight was in the Air Scouts T21b at Lasham in the early sixties. We had gone down for the weekend and after the briefings in the hangar about safety, signalling and where not to push, we went out to fly.
As usual, the flying roster was organized in alphabetical order and so, as usual, I was the last one on the list. So I waited patiently all day, doing the signalling, hook-ups and wing-running. Finally my turn came.
Our instructor was a tall, bearded Naval pilot, who in retrospect, looked a bit like Sharkey Ward, but then maybe all Naval pilots with beards look like Sharkey!
He had done a morning tug shift and then flown four-minute circuits all afternoon and so was presumably a bit bored by the time we launched. It was an auto-tow using an American pickup truck - the first one I had ever seen.
We released at about 1000', straight into a thermal! We climbed to 2200', floated around for a while before descending. "Would you like to see a loop?" "Yes, please, Sir!". So with me holding onto the shoulder-straps like grim death, I did my first-ever loops, in an open cockpit glider.
My colleagues on the ground were green with envy. So sometimes, it's worth being Tail-end Charlie.
