A470 Soaring: April 2020

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.

Wednesday 1 April 2020

It's been a long time and now it's all gone to pot!

Hey everyone. It has been a very long time since I posted anything on here and I will tell you why.

I think we had probably the worst winter, flying wise, that I have ever experienced. We didn't have any particularly cold weather, no frost or snow but, what we did have was rain, and lots of it. From October right through to some brutal storms in February which caused nationwide flooding.

I was keeping a really beady eye on the weather forecast throughout this time, particularly on weekends when I knew that I would have some time on my hands to go out flying but, more often than not it would be raining or there was so little wind in the forecast that I felt it just wasn't worth the effort or fuel to drive to the slopes and scratch around for lift in a 5 or 6 mph breeze.

About three weeks ago I did head up the Meio for a short session when we had about 10 mph but we only managed short flights between rain showers so, it was really nice to be able to head up to Manmoel Common with a brisk easterly wind blowing. This was just prior to strict government restrictions coming into force regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, but the four of us up on the slope did keep well apart from each other.

And now, with some spring weather heading our way I'm going to be stuck indoors with no flying for the foreseeable future.

Here is some video of me flying my L215A and a F3F machine belonging to Clive.