Byron Bay Gliding Club

08/04/2024

Most memorable flight...

05/05/2022

Morning Glory by BBC

Around September or October each year, Burketown in outback Australia becomes the scene for a remarkable and rare natural phenomenon: the Morning Glory.

10/04/2022

Wee bitta wave...

24/02/2022

Russia's national airline Aeroflot will also be banned from landing in the UK.

It follows Moscow's invasion of Ukraine which began with air strikes in the early hours of Thursday morning.

Russia's major banks will have their assets frozen following the invasion of Ukraine, Boris Johnson says.

22/02/2022

07/02/2022

As usual, he was acting the stunt. Early in the morning on the day of the 2010 election, Nigel Farage turned up at an airfield in Northamptonshire, near to the constituency he was contesting. He was wearing his typical pin-striped suit and a rosette in the plum-and-custard colours of his party. He boarded a two-seater plane, the idea being that it would trail a banner bearing the slogan “VOTE FOR YOUR COUNTRY – VOTE UKIP”. Farage wanted to fly in the passenger seat, even though no one would be able to see him from the ground and the TV companies never broadcast campaign stunts on polling day.

You can’t just stick a big banner on the back of a small aircraft. The plane had to take off, gain some height and then make a deep dive in order to use a grappling hook to grab the banner from between two poles. The pilot finally managed to attach the banner at the fifth attempt only for it to become entwined in the tail and rudder. The aircraft was soon plunging towards the earth at 80mph. “Oh f**k!” cried Farage. He closed his eyes just before impact, convinced he was about to die. The plane smashed into a field, nose first and inverted. When Farage opened his eyes, he was upside down, his face was almost touching the ground and his blood was dripping on to the grass. Another few inches and he would have been dead.

Michael Crick’s gripping and vivid study of Mr Brexit is full of revelatory stories, but pulls its punches at the end

01/04/2021

Front page news on the ABC...

You've likely been in a plane before but would you get into an aircraft without an engine? A group of gliding enthusiasts gather at the Charters Towers Airport every Saturday, soaring thousands of feet into the air, without any power onboard.

18/02/2021

Overnight on Wednesday Facebook – which is used by 18 million Australians – prevented the sharing of news and wiped clean the pages of media companies, including the public broadcaster’s television, radio and non-news pages. Government pages – including on bushfires, mental health, emergency services and even meteorology – were also blocked, as were community, women’s health and domestic violence support pages.

11/12/2020

In his first eight missions, at the age of twenty, Yeager shot down two German fighters. On his ninth he was shot down over German-occupied French territory, suffering flak wounds; he bailed out, was picked up by the French underground, which smuggled him across the Pyrenees into Spain disguised as a peasant. In Spain he was jailed briefly, then released, where-upon he made it back to England and returned to combat during the Allied invasion of France. On October 12, 1944, Yeager took on and shot down five German fighter planes in succession.

On November 6, flying a propeller-driven P-51 Mustang, he shot down one of the new jet fighters the Germans had developed, the Messerschmitt- 262, and damaged two more, and on November 20 he shot down four FW-190s. It was a true Frank Luke-style display of warrior fury and personal prowess. By the end of the war he had thirteen and a half kills. He was twenty-two years old.
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The only trouble they had with Yeager was in holding him back. On his first powered flight in the X-I he immediately executed an unauthorized zero-g roll with a full load of rocket fuel, then stood the ship on its tail and went up to .85 Mach in a vertical climb, also unauthorized. On subsequent flights, at speeds between .85 Mach and .9 Mach, Yeager ran into most known airfoil problems—loss of elevator, aileron, and rudder control, heavy trim pressures, Dutch rolls, pitching and buffeting, the lot—yet was convinced, after edging over .9 Mach, that this would all get better, not worse, as you reached Mach 1. The attempt to push beyond Mach 1 —"breaking the sound barrier"—was set for October 14, 1947. Not being an engineer, Yeager didn't believe the "barrier" existed.
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Excerpts from the chapter on Yeager in Tom Wolfe's masterpiece, The Right Stuff, one of the greatest literary works in the field of aviation.

Yeager's autobiography is also enthralling.

08/12/2020

Portrait of Frances Green, Margaret (Peg) Kirchner, Ann Waldner and Blanche Osborn, Women Airforce Service Pilots during WWII, pictured here as they leave their airplane, nicknamed “Pistol Packin Mama,” during training.

Sources: National Museum of the U.S. Air Force / Unknown, “WASP Pilots in front of USAAF B-17 "Pistol Packin Mama.",” The United States in World War II: Historical Debates about America at War, accessed December 6, 2020, http://oberlinlibstaff.com/omeka_hist244/items/show/95.

05/12/2020

I was coming back home on a Southwest flight when I discovered I had one of the funniest flight attendants on board with me. It was one of the best flights I...