The latest SMS Bulletin has been published summarizing safety lessons and reminders from recent events and submissions. Please take a read!

The SMS Bulletin library is located available here: SMS Bulletins

Well, it’s all over. Thanks to the many NESA, PMSC, GBSC, CAP and other volunteers who helped us pull of a sucessful week of fying and seminars. Hope everyone got lots of Wings credits!

Lot’s of great presenters and seminar topics – including Club Safety Culture, Mountain Wave Flying, Advanced X-C tecnique, EPIC flight stories, techniques for blue days to name a few. Presentations are available here.

A great team of instructors from NESA and GBSC and stellar XC mentors including Karl Striedieck, Roy Bourgeois, Rick Roelke and Kempton Izuno.

With the help of both the NESA and PMSC tugs we had 137 launches for the week (109 WSPA + 28 NESA) or 548 aircraft movements! Zero incidents and lots lots of folks getting to fly sailplane types new to them. We operated seven two seaters (2 x Duo Discus, 1 x Blanik L-23, 1 x K-21, 2 x SGS 2-33A and a PW-6U) plus many club and private single seaters. Bill even checked out several participants who got to fly in “003”, his 1-26 serial #3 which was assembled specially for the event.

The week finished out Friday night with a catered banquet held in one of the hangars.

Back to regular club flying next weekend – Sign up now!

As of Wednesday evening 80 flights had been made. Thursday looks to be a rain day with some prospect for soaring Friday.

A few pictures from the week so far:

While the official start to the WSPA seminar week is Monday morning, many event participants began arriving as early as Friday. Saturday weather had been forecast to be pretty darn good, and by noon, one of the gliders had been assembled and i1 was hooked up to the golf cart, when a line of storms heading towards the airport showed up on radar. It turned out that the front that was forecast to move through Friday night had slowed and was about to move through.

It was a good two and a half hours before the rain stopped and the skies began to clear, so Saturday was a washout.

Today made up for it. At 0900 skies were clear and it was warming towards the mid 70’s from an overnight low of 50F.

Bill and Alasdair’s hangars were already open, four tents and two RV campers had arrived overnight, along with more gliders in trailers. Civil Air Patrol was starting operations with two tow planes, three gliders and a dozen cadets for the first day of Glider Academy.

Before any NESA gliders launched, Loretta, Leslie, Philip and Felicity Sparks bicycled by the hangar and stopped to visit. The Sparks are previous NESA members, Philip and Felicity both soloing under Bill B’s tutelage. Felicity continues in her military career, first as an Army helicopter pilot, now flying A-10 Warthogs, and is based in Michigan…so many aviation stars in NESA history.

The first NESA launch was for Bill B to test fly the newly refurbished 2-33, N2041T. Bill has done his usual amazing restoration. It made several flights over the course of the day, and it seems the unanimous agreement is “It’s sooo quiet!” … and 20# lighter than N2042S !

The “nut behind the stick” (by his own admission) towing today was Bob I, CFI-G’s today were Bill B and Jerry, who flew with both club members and WSPA attendees wanting both orientation flights of the area and checkout flights to fly the NESA 1-26 or 1-34.

For most of the day, between CAP, NESA and WSPA attendees, it seemed a glider was launched about every ten minutes. I remember the airport busier only during the aerobatic contests. The weather couldn’t have been better and the winds were light except for an a half hour or so when a few gusts came up.

Ben Berg sent this PIREP:

“The NESA crew was all hands on deck today getting WSPA check flights done and continually launching gliders while merging with CAP traffic. And as a bonus, a lot of us got to fly! From above, in the club’s trusty 1-26, it brought a smile to my face looking down on both NESA 2-33’s and seeing them flying. Not the most booming soaring day, but many of us had hour+ flights, surely one to remember.”

All in all, a glorious day to spend with the community of soaring pilots. NESA is the host club for the WSPA event this week, so please volunteer if you’re able to lend a hand.