About A470 Soaring


This is the blog for a few guys who spend their time flying radio controlled gliders, or slope soarer's, from the many and varied slopes around SE Wales.

This usually begins at the northern end of Cardiff, driving north up the A470 up to the Heads of the Valley's and the southern fringe of the Brecon Beacons. But the A470 road continues its windy way all the way to N Wales.

There are many slopes available for most wind directions, the most famous being the area between Nant-y-Moel and Treorchi known as The Bwlch, which has some of the best slopes and flying in Europe with many F3F competitions being held there each year and visited by many fliers from Europe and around the world. At 1500 feet (450m) above sea level, there is usually more wind than not, and certainly more than at sea level.

If you require any further information, are new to slope soaring or are visiting the area, please contact Steve at steve.houghton59@gmail.com . I look forward to hearing from you.

Take a look at Page 2 (look below and to the left here) for Google maps of our most popular Flying Sites.


Sunday, 14 September 2014

Traceur Maiden Flight

With an easterly forecast on Sunday, the obvious choice of venue to fly was the mighty Crest at the Bwlch. However, I wanted to maiden my Traceur and M60, and the Crest is the least forgiving slope around, so it wasn't my first choice to fly these models for the first time. Mark, Chris and Wayne headed up to the Crest whilst Phil and I went to Manmoel, which overlooks Festival Park in Ebbw Vale, which is a much more forgiving slope with little rotor. The slope faces east and today we had 20 mph plus, plenty of lift for this and in fact, I was a little worried that maybe the wind was too strong, but I needn't have worried.

We test glided the M60, (this is an early version of this plane) but there was a problem and we lost power to the electrics which I suspect is a switch problem so, I'm going to rip out the switch, ( always seems to be the weak link in a radio system) and change the battery.

The Traceur went out fine. It did need quite a few clicks of left aileron and a couple on elevator. I'd set it up with no expo, which I'm not used to as I always put expo on aileron and elevator, but this is not a fast model and I got used to not having exp very quickly. I did pass the tx over to Phil, but he didn't like not having expo.

Anyway, this is a really fun plane and I'm going to look forward to flying this. Here's the video.


Posted by

2 comments:

  1. Phil15 September 2014 at 08:01

    A good day indeed Steve. ..it flew well

    ReplyDelete
  2. SteveH15 September 2014 at 08:23

    It was, and it sure did. Thanks for taking the video, which turned out much better than you expected.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)