Less than three months have passed and we have to find a way to beat even the now legendary June course. Unable to rely on the BGA or the local wildlife to provide the comedy for us, we vow to make our own. Cue the most ambitious production yet mounted by the gliding club.....Soaring 2005. A video account of a week at Hus Bos, with the occasional bit of gliding thrown in for good measure. Grand plans were afoot. It was a week that would be impossible to forget.

The line-up for the week included the regulars: Oli, Chris D, Steve and Pey Shan; the returnees: Mike (who missed June and missed out) and Chris P (who seems to think thesis writing is a good enough excuse for not gliding!) and two newer members: Costin and Lanning. Also, joining us on the Wednesday, a very special guest – Phil who was the first wearer of the president hat of power, back to see what his gliding club gets up to these days. He had no idea what he was going to find. With an army of instructors and the club fleet at the ready, the stage was set.

Out of those that had been before, getting back into form on the Monday was harder for some than others. With a single check flight Steve, Oli and Mike were off on their own, but it wasn't all like that. Chris D was closer than instructor Mick Hughes would have liked to landing a field short, and there is a truly abysmal attempt at a landing caught on film that is still not attributed to anyone.... Before long though we were back up to speed and getting on with the important business of flying. The weather was better than we had any right to expect for mid-September, with sunglasses required at times!

By the Tuesday, the demands of a rigorous filming schedule was beginning to take over. The toughest shots were take off and landing runs, where we wanted to drive alongside the glider as it took off or landed. The problem - the runway isn't long enough for that. A glider is barely off the ground when the tarmac ends. This was after realising the golf buggy was far to slow to keep up with a rapidly accelerating plane anyway. The only solution - take Oli's car onto the road that runs parallel to the airstrip and try to film through the sunroof. With Oli filming and Chris D the stunt driver, as well as occasional traffic and cyclists who felt they had a right to use the public roads at inconvenient times, it made for some eventful times (note: safety was paramount, filming runs were not made when other cars were on the road, and no-one was ever in danger at all - no lawsuits please!) The difficulty was starting the car's run so that we were level with the glider as it began its take off, and at approximately the same speed. With the sunroof and the windows wide open, it was completely impossible for the poor driver to hear a word the camera man was telling him, and a few practice runs were necessary to get the timing right. By the Wednesday though, we had it down to a fine art and moved onto filming the landing runs, with the added difficulty of not only matching speeds, but trying to judge from a distance where the round out position would be. Some of our successful shots made the final cut, and some of the early practice attempts can be giggled at in the outtakes.

The whole week at the airfield was very busy with many club members getting as much flying in before the autumn weather hit as well as a BGA instructors course all going on. We also had an airfield invasion by a passing rambler, who gets a special cameo in the video. There was what may be the longest launch in history as Costin sat there waiting at the front of the queue for a winch discussing the flight for a whole 14 minutes before his instructor was finally ready to go after which they took off and made a flight that lasted......less than 7 minutes. This was also the course where, in protest at the choice of ciders on offer in the clubhouse bar, certain members of the exec took it upon themselves to stock the barrel room with an illicit stash of club cider, severely annoying some old git who thought he ran the place in the process. And let's not forget to mention the "Panpipe Christmas" CD we found in the bar that was so bad it caused a good five minutes of amusement one evening. Wednesday afternoon we rolled out the old open-topped wooden T21 glider and took that for a spin (not literally!) Real spinning was restricted to a stunt flight Oli took with Mick Hughes filmed for the video, with not just spins but also loop-the-loops and other odd aerobatics included.

In with all this chaos some serious gliding took place. Chris P was also cleared for solo and by the second half of the week there were 4 solo pilots flying around the sky, a club record. Because so many of the group got to fly single-seaters, the newer pilots got a lot of extra time with the instructors in the two-seater craft and good experience as a result. Not that this helped Chris D get any closer to his first solo (more on why later). The conditions weren't as thermic as they had been in June, but worthy of note was a very respectable 45 minutes managed by Oli. He's still got a way to go to catch up with Steve though, who managed an impressive 80 minute flight this time. From the educational point of view, one of the highpoints should have been an invitation to a BGA safety presentation one evening, but it turned more into a cabaret act as a certain member of the club demonstrated his knowledge of physics to be rather greater than that claimed by the BGA safety officer.

But surely the most memorable moment of the week belongs to Chris D and one of the more interesting attempts at landing that Hus Bos has seen. The airstrip at Hus Bos is approximately wide enough for four gliders, but with the huge length of the strip this does not normally restrict where we can land. On this particular occasion, with the queue of gliders waiting for the winch, the queue waiting for the aerotow, and one inconveniently landed nearby, there was only a narrow strip of field near the launch point to land in. If you feel confident that you can fly dead straight though such a gap you can do that and land in the gap or a little further down the field - and this is precisely what was done. Now this might sound like an impressive display of piloting skill but it was put into a slightly different perspective when Phil choose that moment to walk out to the wingtip of one of the waiting gliders, saw the incoming glider coming into land, and dived out of the way very stylishly. The incoming K21 went through the gap in the line of gliders as planned (and safely far away from hitting anyone!) but the pilot had pointed out to him later that while it was an impressive landing, there was half a kilometer of field behind the parked gliders that would have been perfectly sufficient landing sites. All I can say is "Oh yeah I guess so". And also "Nice dive Phil, sorry for the fright". It was a valuable lesson in not talking yourself into making difficult landings when its really not necessary.

The final course of 2005 was one of the most successful and memorable courses ever run by the gliding club, and also one of the most enjoyable. And of course the memories are there to live again as, for our all our hard work, in October we got to release to the world Soaring 2005 - one of the best gliding videos available on the web.

June 2005 was the possibly the best weather we've ever had on a gliding course. Forgotten were the days of woolly hats and gloves, now it was about which of the dozen bottles of sun cream belonged to who. The weather all week was absolutely gorgeous, if anything it was too hot some days. We also had a bizarre situation that had never happened before - having too many gliders and instructors! Sometimes they were keeping us going when what we wanted was a rest for five minutes. If ever the club wanted a course to show what gliding's all about, this course was it.

There were six people on the course - Steve and Oli flying solo, Chris D, Pey Shan, Dave and Janice, a complete beginner who came along to try it and got a better introduction to gliding than she could possibly have imagined. With Steve and Pey Shan trying to get out of the mud bath that was Glastonbury on the Monday, the rest of us were treated to beautiful sunshine and a lot of flying. British weather can be so unfair sometimes! We were joined by the intrepid adventurers later that day, and also by Nigel - a BA a pilot who wanted to give gliding a try. Mastering the whole flying thing was a piece of cake for a professional pilot and by the end he was showing us how it should be done, going solo in less than four days. Not disheartened at all, we took advantage of the weather and flew as much as we could. But we couldn't keep up with Nigel.

Tuesday was a very hot day. And a very sunny day. Now no complaints about the weather at all, but it was tiring. It was the humid sort of heat that tells you a thunder storm is on the way - and it was. Fortunately it arrived after dark a gave the club some magificent views from the bar. Or at least it did for those who weren't already fast asleep at the tragically early hour of 8pm because they had flown 8 times that day in the beating sun and a 10 hour snooze was required. When I awoke I realised firstly that I'd missed dinner but also, after double checking the time, that it was actually 6am the next day and I'd completely missed the entire storm. Like everyone else, I had got so much flying in I was knackered, but unlike everyone else, I'd caught the sun badly. Note to self there - use more sun cream in future! I was actually quite relieved to have a more relaxed day on Wednesday, back to pleasant temperatures again.

The amount of flying we all got in during the week was unbelievable, and was helped by having some wonderful thermal activity later in the week. Friday in particular was a great day for the thermals and provided one of the moments of the course when Steve, flying solo in a single-seater, and Chris, flying with instructor Sid Gilmore in a two-seater, spent an entertaining hour following each other round the sky trying out the best thermals. Thermals are like gold dust for glider pilots - warm air that's going up, carrying the glider with it if you circle accurately. More than one glider can ride a thermal at once provided all pilots circle at a safe distance from each other, and then everyone can enjoy the heights and extended flight times thermals can give - as well as the challenge of riding the thermal in the first place. We had the opportunity to experience how good gliding can be when the weather co-operates! In the end though we had to return to the ground to give everyone else a go, and the debate rages to this day - was Steve's 75 minutes or Chris' 70 minutes better? You see Steve got towed all the way up there, which takes about 5 minutes, whereas Chris had a winch launch and had to climb his way up, but he did have guidance from Sid.....maybe we should just call it a draw!

We were joined on their airfield by the British Gliding Association who were running an advanced course for instructors that week and the BGA helped to provide one of the unforgettable comedy moments of 2005. The traditional curry nights that we and the BGA organise fell on the same night so we combined them and took over virtually the entire the local Indian restaurant. But we had an interesting time getting into town. Running a little bit behind most of the rest of the group we were a little confused to get a phone call from Dave just as we were leaving the airfield saying that his bonnet had come of just down the road. "Er, ok...." we say, not quite sure what's going on. Rescue party on the way. But the BGA arrived at the scene before us, and stopped to help. The bonnet had somehow popped open and been blown completely off the car, and was lying mangled and dented in the road. Quite a sight greated the rescue party when they turned up a minute or two later - a dozen senior BGA instructors jumping up and down on Dave's bonnet attempting to get it back into shape again! It was after this we decided to always have a camera on standby on our courses, just in case. The bonnet itself, when it was flat enough, was gaffer-taped back onto the car, and we made it to the Indian on time.

There was gliding related comedy as well. Inevitably it involved Chris and Sid. It was thereafter known simply as "The Bird Incident". Now imagine this scene: a beautiful summer afternoon, flying high in the clouds, and the instructor (Sid) in the back seat notices a bird out of the corner of his eye. Now birds, unsurprisingly, know an awful lot about flying, and if you see a bird hovering in the air not apparently doing very much that probably means there's rising air there. The bird has found it and is getting a free ride up - it's the avian equivalent of choosing the escalator over the stairs. When a glider pilot sees hovering birds, he knows that's a very good place to try and gain some height. So naturally Sid gives the instruction "Follow that bird!" and as the pilot that's exactly what Chris does. He's been working on his controlled turns so he is able to aim at the bird, bank the glider smoothly, and do precisely as the instructor asked. Only the problem was, he did it rather too well. A glider flying through the air at 50 knots is going to catch up with a hovering bird very very quickly and the pilot was taken rather by surprise when only a second after turning towards the bird he found himself rapidly overshooting it! The aim and direction was perfect, the concept of relative speeds was temporarily forgotten. The glider flew right over the top of the poor bird which had been innocently minding its own business, to hoots of laughter from Sid in the back. The bird itself, quite understandably, headed straight down, as far away from the glider as it could get as fast as possible! Then came the challenge of getting through the rest of the flight and landing safely with both pilot and instructor virtually crippled by laughter. The bird returned to its nest to recover.

For all the comedy moments, the June 2005 course will be remembered as giving us the best gliding we've ever had. The conditions were perfect, we all got loads of airtime, and we all made massive progress and learnt an awful lot as a result - especially the newer pilots. And we had a bright idea - if courses can be this good let's film the next one...... Roll on September!