Seeing as there's quite a bit of glider love amongst the membership (and the thread is well and truly drifted already) .... here's a pic of a more unusual glider ... I started my glider training on one of these at RAF Dishforth ... it hosted a joint military/cilvilian gliding club and I enjoyed flying there in one of these until some sort of rapid response unit got moved there complete with their wicked looking helos and C-130 ... at which point the civvies were given the elbow for security reasons ... so we all decamped to Burn Gliding Club down the road.

It's a Let Blanik ...... All aluminium construction ... rare in the UK but the US used them for primary training for their military pilots until well into the 2000s ... built like a tank and the cockpit was wonderfully reminiscent of a '50s Soviet fighter ... good fun to fly 🙂

[Linked Image]

K

Ps .. several of these have been modified to power ... including a turbine one I believe 😮

Pps .. they even had 50's style wing-tip fuel tanks .... not really 🙂 .... there to reduce wing-tip vortices and help with drag

Ppps .. this post is growing legs! .... looking on wikipeadia it appears that my 'unusual' classification at the start may be a UK viewpoint ... they claim it's the most numerous training glider ever with 3000+ being made (compared to 700+ for the seemingly ubiquitous ASK-13) .... my guess is most were used in the Eastern Bloc with only limited numbers in the West ... hence my mistake ... the one I flew at Dishforth is certainly the only one I've ever seen in real life.

Last edited by Image; 09/03/23 10:07 AM.