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.


Friday 11 September 2020

Banging Slope Soaring session on Mickey's

What a fun days flying that was!

I arrived at the lay-by at The Bwlch at 10 AM on Saturday and waited for a bunch of other guys to arrive and, they duly did in dribs and drabs over the next 30 minutes or so.

The forecast was for a NW breeze of about 16 mph at Bridgend, so I was expecting about 20 mph in the compression zone on the slope as we marched in single file along the narrow track to our flying spot. On arrival the wind was slightly more westerly than we'd have liked, and it would come and go a bit, which was fine for flying foamy models but no one wanted to risk launching an expensive moudie. 

So after about an hour a couple of the guys decided to head off to Mickeys, the westerly slope to see if that was any better and, after about 30 minutes we received a phone call to say that Mickey's was flying very well and so we packed up, decamped and trundled over to the far westerly slope.

This was a good move with the wind being bang on square to the slope and about 18 mph, so all the big guns were brought out, including a 1/4 scale ASW20 belonging to Mark, one of the two visitors flying with us that day.

Check out the video of the days flying activity and don't forget to subscibe to my YouTube channel.


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