Wednesday 23 March 2011

Glider towing

The time is clearly lacking to upload some pictures, although I have taken hundreds and hundreds in the past two weeks.
I've completed the towing training and started the real work, and it is absolutely great to get to fly everyday! I also got to do a 7 hour flight in a two-seat glider last week-end.

Although we don't fly non-stop from early mornings to late evenings, the days get fairly busy. In the morning, we have the briefings, then we get the planes all ready and make them shine. Around half-noon come the busy times, where most gliders take-off. On a Southerly wind day (usual for the area), we use three different take-off zones, all converging towards the south end of the airfield. At times, 8 tugs (towing planes) are running as the same time, and one or two persons are in charge of all those people in the control tower (rather an inflight information tower).
Things calm down around 2:30pm until 4, when gliders start coming down and more tows are due to be done.
In this time of year, most gliders are landed by 6:30pm, when we refuel and clean the planes before putting them back in the hangars. A final piece of paperwork and we're done for the day.

I'm also starting to get use to the information service in the control tower, and I'll be on my own for the week-end. We basically enter in a computer the take-off and landing times of each glider, their pilot(s), who towed them, etc ... , and we give basic information over the radio, both in English and in French.

Well, very pleased with everything and the flying right in the middle of the French Alps!

Airborne life continues...




4 comments:

Guido BENEDETTO said...

great shots!!!

Chris said...

It looks absolutely beautiful!

What type of aeroplanes are you using to two with?

Golfcharlie232 said...

We use 4 Robin DR-400R, not sure it is a very famous plane outside France. There's also a MCR-180R with a 5 blade prop, which I should be flying in a few weeks.

Irishrover63 said...

Do you have a flickr account were your images can be viewed?