Gliding in its present form is a lot of hassle for minimal reward.
Not much came of the “full, accommodated weekend” idea.
If you look back here via this FoI response, there was a lot of work going on to try & set up BGA sites as “approved” places for gliding.
I had been liaising extensively with our R Av O, including a visit to our local BGA site (Cambridge Gliding Centre) & it all looked very positive…
Then, all of a sudden, it was all curtailed.
A cynic might say, not much - apart from JM’s MBE…
What still makes me smile is that Halton got closed as part of the big drawdown and the statement at the time for not converting was that the site wasn’t suitable for Vikings/Winch Launch.
Yet the BGA Operate on the same airfield with zero issues.
Does anybody know what the VGS budget is? It would be a very interesting exercise to work out the cost per cadet / per sortie / per set of wings / per glider etc.
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I imagine that would be pretty grim reading.
It’ll be a single sentence with reference to commercial interests somewhere and no numbers!
I also recon they’d struggle to give an exact cost to just the VGS budget as there’ll be a lot of people working at HQAC on the issue for the last few years that also do other things.
Its my guess that the cost per flight would be considerably more than the £100 per trial flight charged at most civvy gliding clubs!
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And also the difficulty allocating the costs of running the airfield in many places
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Exactly. They couldn’t work out which aircraft were maintained properly, so good luck working out how much it cost!
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Within this FoI response, one of the original “decision” documents- Vigilant actions signed off to allow some airframes to operate.
I’ve somehow missed this before! Thanks. Should make for an interesting read. Only on page 3 and already laughing. “Operational Plan” puts return to flight at Sep 2016. Ha.
You’ll be crying soon… 
Just now remembering how much of a headache it is to read reports where every fourth word is an acronym. And each paragraph has two new ones added.
Some pretty bad stuff in there. I’m not reading the entirety of Annex B, but I guess a lot of it isn’t new information to me. The whole thing has been a massive shambles
The under-statement of the last 7 yrs of the “gliding pause.” 
I could understand if we were operating complex airliners that require in-depth maintenance, including A, B, C or D checks.
For example, a D check is a heavy maintenance inspection - about every 5 yrs. During this, an aircraft is completely torn down for overhaul (back to bare metal, x-rayed in places, eddy current testing, the works), taking an aircraft out of service for 4 - 6 wks typically. For a B747, this requires approximately 40,000 man hours of maintenance - BA maintenance at Cardiff would take around 4 - 5 wks.
However, we are operating simple gliders, no engines (now), few moving parts. Even allowing for differences in materials, I fail to see why so little has been done over such a protracted period.
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Omnishambles doesnt do this justice.
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The problem is the only to do it justice would be to breach the AUP and get permabanned
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That’s why I stuck with massive shambles 
Another (flying) pause in bound?