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, 21 June 2015

Blog Catch Up, Aurora 9 problem & PSS Fly for Fun event

Hi all.

Well it's been a while since I posted, life has just been very busy and it seems I'm going to be busy until mid October with various stuff.

Aurora 9

Firstly, I've finally managed to sort out the problem with my Hitec Aurora 9. Sometimes when I have a problem with something that I just cannot sort out, I put it away for a while and then all of a sudden I have one of those, "eureka" moments. Well this is what happened and I decided to just go through the system menu, tab by tab and see if I could spot something that wasn't right. Why I chose to click the Mode tab first I don't know, but I did, and noticed that the mode had changed from 2 to 3. Doh! How the fluff did that happen? I switched it back to mode 2 and everything was back to normal. Phew.

PSSA Fly for Fun

 So Michelle and I headed up to Llandudno on Friday 12th June, a long 4 hour drive but with stunning scenery. We found the camp site, set up, then headed up to the Orme to try out the NE facing slope, the one by the dry ski slope. Unfortunately there was hardly any wind and I wasn't prepared to even chuck the Wildthing off as not even the gulls were cruising the cliff.

The forecast for Saturday was for a NE wind again, however, Tim Mackey had got up there early only to find that the wind was actually coming in from WNW, so the message was sent out and we all headed for the tank track car park.

The wind was only about 9 mph, not strong enough for PSS models, but we did manage to fly foamies and various other light wind models.

Later on in the afternoon the wind did swing around more westerly and increased a little, just enough for a couple of Jet Provosts to be launched.

Sunday saw the WNW wind back at 9 - 12mph and we did manage to have a bit of fun playing follow my leader behind Phil Cooks T33 and a couple of Mark Kettle Vulcans.

Despite the poor wind conditions,  we did have a good time and I have already booked my camping for the Llyn Peninsula fly for fun event. Hopefully I'll get to fly the Lightning this time.

Check out the video and until next time, happy flying guys.


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