Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Gliding To 70,000ft

Just checked the club website (ooohh fancy! ... I flew there pre-internet!🙂) .... they still have the K13 ... the same one I soloed in .. they've had it 50 years, a real testament to the durability of steel tube and fabric construction ... I wonder if the current crop of composite gliders will still be getting their C of A in half a century!! ..... they have a selection of modern and very slippery planes ... but no mention of the trusty K8 ... I guess it fell foul of a heavy landing or some such in the intervening 40 years.

K

Rich my instructor on my Commercial pilot course was an ex Spitfire pilot who also taught German pilots to fly Starfighters.

Some history here ?? http://www.burnglidingclub.co.uk/forum/General-Discussion/K8-for-Sale/-T114/

Not much gets past the interwebby ..... looks likely they punted it on to a private owner if they could find one to take it on. Hope it survived ... had a good few enjoyable flights in it.

K

Here is some history about Schleicher:
https://www.alexander-schleicher.de/en/werk/historie/

You have built a very nice model. I did most of my flights in the K8.

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 🙂



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.

The Blanik... I flew one in 1975 from Shobdon Airfield for an aero tow lesson.
The most disconcerting thing was the noise from the control cables rattling on the metal skin!
I went back to a K13 ant the Long Mynd!

The Blanik... I flew one in 1975 from Shobdon Airfield for an aero tow lesson.
The most disconcerting thing was the noise from the control cables rattling on the metal skin!
I went back to a K13 ant the Long Mynd!

Unusual in having real flaps .... and a retractable undercarriage (which wasn't common back then... though everywhere now) ..... from a pilot training point of view it replicated future workloads better than most gliders of the period in having one of most things the pilot would go on to find on later airframes as they moved up the pecking order of performance and complexity.

I wonder how many there were active in the UK? ... and if any still fly ... they had main-spar fatigue issues and were stopped doing aerobatics by the powers that be.

K

The Dublin Gliding club had a Blanik - I loved it!