Hi all,

I recently got my license and I would like to start flying regularly. I live in a country with good weather but very few gliding airfields, around eight. The closest club to me has old, poorly maintained gliders (mostly Astir) that spend more time in maintenance than in the air, and syndicate options are limited and hard to share on good days.

My requirements are:

• Conventional (non-pendular) elevator.
• Nose hook.
• Capable of at least a 500 km flight when the moment comes.
• Good gel coat, full canopy, retractable gear.
• Around €10,000–20,000.

I think the LS1-f and DG-101G fit. I found an '82 DG-101G for €18,000 with a blue canopy and pointy wingtips. It was a club glider in Germany for many years, then privately owned by at least three pilots: 4,500+ hours and 7,500+ launches.

There are some paint patches (on lower wing surfaces and tail), but a friend who works with composites (and owns a DG-101G) confirmed by the images that the gel coat looks good and the patches are cosmetic. Documentation is in order, all recent inspections passed. The current owner is an instructor who barely flew it the past three years.

My only concern is the play in the controls. It passed inspections in Germany, but I have seen gliders in my country with more play than a worn-out Chevy pickup with 300,000 miles on it.

I am going to see it soon to check everything on site. What do you think?

Select video file locally, select IGC file. Sync using the timeline tool and select instruments to display. Asi, Groundspeed, altitude, ground track, position map, altitude profile etc etc.

If flarm data is in the IGC it can be displayed too.

I am refurbishing a 1981 DG-200. It has the original seat belts with beautiful and original West German hardware! Well past a 15 year service life.

Any suggestions on a rewebbing service?

Think I can get the hardware inspected/refuebished?

The plane is 400 miles away from me at the moment, so I cannot provide pictures to help.

Just don’t want to have to spend $900 for a new 4 point harness.

Visitor to Denbigh for a bit of our wave. Russell self launches his JS5.

Ooooh my precious!

Bonjour.

d’ici l’été j’aimerais m’offrir des vols en planeur afin d’obtenir une licence SPL et découvrir les sensations du vol.

Mon objectif à long terme est de devenir pilote de ligne. C’est pour cela que j’aimerais en faire ma première expérience.

Cependant quelque chose me met un frein : l’altitude.
Je sais que cela peut être contradictoire vu que c’est le principe même du vol mais cette pression d’être dans le vide me paraît largement surmontable.
J’ai déjà pris l’avion plusieurs fois et pourtant il y a pas de soucis, j’ai toujours un petit stress pas dérangeant, voir « agréable », j’aime regarder par le hublot pour nous voir prendre l’altitude.
Mais l’idée d’être dans un endroit clos et serré (donc le planeur) et voir le vide tout autour de moi me met plutôt mal à l’aise.
J’aimerais savoir si on s’y habitue vite ? Ou chacun son propre ressenti ?
Par exemple je pense que réaliser des vols sur des avions avec moteur me ferait moins peur mais cela est trop cher.
En fait j’ai beaucoup d’appréhension sur le planeur, auriez-vous des conseils s’il vous plait ?
Merci

We had a chance to fly N2472W out over the aspens and mountains on Friday for some pictures. Thought I would post one here.

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing fine,

I am going to start my gliding training soon (21. November) and I need to self study very much. I need to read the book “Fliegen ohne Motor“, but I don’t know how I am going to remember everything on those 300+ pages.

How do you all properly self study? Do you note every important things on your iPad? I don’t have a tablet, but I don’t want to write everything on paper…? What are tips that helped you?

Thanks and have a good day :)

(English isn’t my first language so please be respectful, ty)

Two weeks ago I posted Airmass Wx (https://airmass.app) here and the response was mixed. I agree the original title sounded like a lot of low-effort app posts.

To clarify something from that thread: the UI and app structure were built with AI. I am one person and designing a website from scratch is a challenge. I did most of the physics by hand, with help from a friend who studied meteorology. I’ve flown with it twice so far (the weather’s been poor), and it matched the days better than any other weather app I have used, including Skysight.

Here’s what’s changed since then.

Planning

• Right-click (or long-press) anywhere on the map for a final glide to that point. It uses the real terrain, the forecast wind, and your safety height, and compares the result with the thermal tops where you start.
• Glide range follows the terrain instead of being a circle.
• The XC planner has an auto route (beta) that routes each leg through better lift and shows the time saved.
• Thermal height is now the usable height for your glider, where the lift drops below its circling sink.
• XC speed and flight distance now account for the wind and ridge lift.

Forecast

• Cumulus growth accounts for mixing with the drier air around the cloud, which removed many false overdevelopment warnings.
• Thermals drift downwind, for example off a lake’s downwind shore.
• Thin cirrus no longer counts as overcast or shuts down the thermals.
• Active NWS storm warnings show as a banner, and the popup shows when precipitation is expected to start.
• GFS updates four times a day, and coverage now includes Alaska and New Zealand.

3D

• Lenticulars at wave crests, convergence lines, sink, and your task drawn in the air.

Tasks and waypoints

• Load .cup waypoints, open and save .tsk and .xctsk tasks, and send them to SeeYou, XCSoar, XCTrack or LXNAV Connect.

General aviation

• Many changes, mainly much better route planning.

The first 24 hours are free without an account. Pro is $2.99 a month until November 7, then $3.99. ECMWF and/or other models are coming soon.

If the forecast gets your day wrong, let me know where, when, and what you saw.

Hi! My husband and I have just driven down from Edinburgh to Cambridge and saw 3 cars towing (what I believe to be) gliders. One was heading north, two heading south. We have never seen one before so were curious as to if there was some sort of gliding event in the UK this weekend which led to us seeing 3 in one day! Ta :)

A casual day out and decided to start up the noisemaker to get away.

Not a last minute start but an indication of what's involved.

The climb is then about 4 kts. Best operation is to fly at around 80 kts. As a past Solo turbo operator that takes some getting used to as with the 2 stroke you tend to climb at min sink speed not belting around! As I got the jet started this time I flew in to a bit of lift so just shut down again.

The control panel is on at the start of the video. It takes about 10 seconds to come on and do some self tests.

at 25 seconds - switch the control to 'erect'. When up the drag is less than having the wheel down!

at 30 seconds I switched the power source to battery 1, battery 2 is an old 10Ah pack and cant withstand the current required by the ignitors any more. Battery needs replacing.

at 36 seconds ( 11 seconds after selecting engine up ) the engine contro flips over to 'Switch to run' )

at 39 seconds I switch to run. The FADEC then takes control of spool up and start.

at about 57 seconds the ignitor starts firing as 3000 rpm is reached.

at 1:22 the engine is at idle 30000 rpm and I can throttle up. Roughly 60 seconds and 140' from erecting the engine.

before 1:30 has elapsed I have full power ( I only throttled up to 85% or so ).

a minute later I was in lift. Throttle down, Ignition off, wait a minute for it to cool and put it away.

Didn't look good this morning but decided to take a quick lob onto the ridge. Straight off tow, climbed into very gentle wave below leaden skies with layers at 2000', 3500'and 5000. Eventually worked upwind into a big Foehn gap and then up to about 7500. Pushed forward 20k to Abergele only losing 1000' and then climbing up to 10000. Forward again to the Conwy valley but very soft back to 10000' tried to contact whatever was creating a multiple stack of lennies really high over Betwys y coed area but no dice so fell back to near the club. Contacted more about 10k from home and worked it to 11100'. Pushed back upwind but too soft for fun! A brief climb about 2km out to sea with the autumn sky clear and everything below stark and crisp in the sunlight. Never got down to freezing, about 3°C at 11000!

Not a bad way to spend a Monday!

https://www.weglide.org/flight/1251102

Not a native port: it's the Windows version running through a Wine-based compatibility layer, with no VM and no Windows install needed, which gives much better performance. Getting it to run properly is tricky and took a lot of trial and error, but I now know exactly how to set everything up. Maybe i share more details or screenshots if anyone is interested!

Setup

• MacOS 15.8.1, M1 16gb ram
• Crossover 26.3
• RosettaHack x87 + JIT to fix performance of Rosetta for x32
• DXMT 0.8 for Direct X11 to Metal translation
• Also needed some custom runtime patching to fix some stuff

Really good sloper!

Hey all,

2500hr pilot (all GA, tailwheel, aerobatic, etc) looking to get into soaring. Specifically looking for a glider to fly in the Eastern Sierra, mostly between Lone Pine and Bishop. I see the PW-5's get a lot of hate online, somewhat understandably given their L/D and penetration limitations, but they intrigue me because they can be found for half the price of an ASW-20 or similar, while being 20 years newer with a quarter of the total time. The Pik-20 has also been on my radar, but the rain performance issue seems like a downside.

Thoughts on how a PW-5 stacks up against other <20k gliders?

Hey, I'm about to finally get my license after several years of training. I'm thinking about purchasing my own glider next year since our club is growing very fast and seats are getting a little bit rare especially if you plan to do long cross-country flights.

My budget is 30-40k€, I'm 1,93m and quite slim. The aircrafts I have in mind are LS3/LS4, ASW20 and DG300. I flew the LS4neo and loved it, also I could fit in very comfortable.

I would love to read some advices of pilots who are experienced in at least one of the gliders since I only flew the LS4neo.

Thanks!

SkySight’s new 100-metre Wind and Ridge Forecast model has left beta and is now generally available across all SkySight forecast regions. It works great for mountain flying, helping you find the fastest ridges and avoid getting dumped. It's very useful even in just hilly terrain, as the local flow peaks tend to be good for thermal formation.

We trained this model on 100m OpenFOAM CFD simulations over the entirety of our forecast areas, running on GPU's. We think this will be as big of a step forward as when we brought wave forecasts into the cockpit in 2017.

Would love to hear what everyone thinks, especially those who've been flying with it via Copilot. I'm available to answer questions.

UPDATE: It now covers the US, Europe, South America, and South Africa. Large improvements to 3D view and model detail and accuracy have been made. The screenshot is outdated.

The app is called Airmasss Wx.

What it does:

Thermal strength, height and width, cloudbase, cloud type (blue thermals vs cumulus, all stages and all clouds until overdevelopment), wind at , from HRRR (2 days) and GFS (14 days), and a high resolution thermal catalyst model and wind model.

• Ridge lift and lee sink worked out on ~30 m terrain, plus how high the ridge lift reaches and lee waves
• Thermal tops and cloudbase measured from the real ground, not the model's smoothed terrain
• Tap anywhere for a point forecast, Skew-T, Atmospheric profile, or wave cross-section
• XC speed and flight distance for your own glider polar, and a route planner that flies your task through the forecast
• Live radar, satellite, FAA sectionals and airspace on the same map
• A 3D view of terrain with thermals, cumulus, ridge lift, and waves drawn in
• Many other layers
• 18 hours and the surface layers are free, no account needed.

It covers the US for now. I'd really like to hear from people who fly: what's wrong, what's missing, and how it compares with what you use now (SkySight, XC Skies, Windy, ForeFlight). My goal is to create a professional app with less of the professional cost overhead. Screenshot below of the 3D view over California.

I've been gliding a lot. This season 70h have been added to my logbook. Amazing.

The soaring season has also came to an end. and i thought, why not get a glider? My own glider.

I only fly Polish made gliders. So far, only the SZD-50 Puchacz and SZD-51 Junior. (This season i only flew the Junior). So this is what i will probably end up buying. Something from the laminated SZD line. Probably the SZD-41 Jantar Standard. Because that seems like a better deal then the 51. But first, i will get atleast 30h of rental time on it. I really want to "get a hold of it" before i dive deep and buy it.

I set aside 20k EUR. Everything from the actual sailplane, to the trailer and additional expenses.

Now that i'm a full time airline pilot, i hope to fly more often, especially on off time. Both unpowered and powered aviation. Hopefully i can add 100h to my glider hours.

Where do i even find a glider for sale? There are so many websites, with so little listings. Whats the best place?

Trying to figure out the endorsements to take my commercial written. I am an ASEL pilot and have taken my CAX written and scored a 98 on it but now am thinking I want to do my commercial glider as my initial commercial cert, I like the focus on stick and rudder skills and energy management. I used Gold Seal for my commercial prep and the endorsement is specifically for the Commercial Airplane written. Do I need to take a specific glider commercial course for the ground portion? I’m not opposed to ASA Prepware if that works.

And another note- is there a Sheppard Air equivalent for the CGX test bank? No sense in leaving anything to chance.