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.


Monday, 20 June 2016

More foamie fun on Meio

On Saturday, Phil and I decided to fly on Meio Common as it is much closer to home than the Bwlch and we both had other things we needed to do that day.

The forecast was for a 9 mph north westerly at Cardiff Airport, but when we arrived, there definitely wasn't that wind speed. I tried launching my trusty Wildthing, which will just about keep airborne in about 8 mph, but it was struggling.

So we sat around for a little while, chatting, until the wind seemed to pick up just a little, so I launched again and managed to keep the Thing in the air, gaining some height using the weak thermals that were floating by on the breeze.

Josh was flying his Beevolution but struggling to stay in the air, and Phil launched his Speedo, which also struggled, and in fact came down on the slope face.

Now the north west facing slope of Meio is covered in thick, 3' high ferns, and it must have taken Phil, his two sons Josh, Tom and myself a good 20 minutes to locate the model.

By this time the wind was slowly beginning to pick up and it was swinging around to a more westerly direction, so we upped sticks and moved a couple of hundred metres onto the point and we flew again, but we were probably only there 15 minutes before we ended up having to move again to the favoured south westerly slope.

By this time there was enough wind to keep the foamies in the air, and Phil decided to stand a pop bottle on the ridge line to see if we could knock it over with the models, and so we had a bit of fun doing that as the video below shows.

I'm glad that we didn't decide to go up to the Bwlch as with the wind shifting direction, we would have had a long walk between slopes. Also, we can see the Bwlch from Meio and it looked like it was clagging over, so I think we made the right choice of venue.

Enjoy the video, which I took using my iPhone and edited using the iMovie app.

Happy flying
Steve




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