I would prefer to see the priority being the tens of thousands of cadets who have never been in a glider, and most likely never will, even if they do a full term in the cadets.
Congratulations to those cadets who live close enough to a VGS to be able to do scholarships or become FSC, but it shouldn’t come down to postcodes.
If you think 15 cadets gliding over a week is ‘AMAZING and successful’, consider this … a week ago, on a Friday evening, my local gliding club flew 20 scouts in 3 hours using two gliders and 6 club members.
Why can’t the Air Cadets deliver anything like this kind of volume?
I’m just fed-up of cadets giving their reason for leaving as, “I thought there’d be more flying Sir!”
It’s not great, but in terms of rebuilding capacityafter the carnage of the pause and Covid those Gold wings are important.
I think you’ll struggle to find anyone outside of HQ who would disagree with you on the postcode lottery, and we need to make more use of the civilian clubs
The Air Cadets can but they also do other things, they need to do the other stuff to be able to do the blue wings. Staff development is key to continued provision. You’re also seeing one snapshot of things with the scouts - one very short window of flying rather than all the other flying that gliding club do day in and out. The gliding club would not be able to do that all day every day, in the same way that the VGS doesn’t. On top of that, when the RAF GSA’s were delivering cadet gliding it caused a rebellion amongst their instructors at a number of clubs and they haemorrhaged club members because they started to refuse to do it because they didn’t enjoy it. LaSER saw massive allocation cancellations from the GSA they used after the first couple of months as the club members just refused to fly cadets anymore.
On top of all that, the Scouts might get higher numbers through in this one afternoon you’re looking at but at that volume they’re getting less of an experience than the blue wings cadets do - less air time than Air Cadets get as standard regardless of what they’re doing in the air.
I call BS… okay Turbo’s figures may not account for time spent on the ground, but of the 2 cadets I’ve sent this year since getting going again, they got 11min and 16 min respectively.
Considering they’re near enough spending a whole day at a VGS site (+travelling), whereas getting a similar amount of ‘flight time’ within 3hrs… I know what i’d consider better VFM
Context missing here. 632 home base at Ternhill unavailable hence the deployment. Given the issues faced and overcome it is a great outcome - The easier solution, which would have delivered zero, would have been simply to shut up shop until the Ternhill issues resolved.
We need a can do bums on seats approach like we had, not grandstanding. It is very, very, very sad it has come to this and those involved can’t or won’t see it that way. We should be bussing in 20 cadets a time and giving them the experience they deserve. Mind you they’d be spending 5-6 hrs travelling.
Fannying around like this won’t get as said thousands of cadets the experience which is supposed to be our USP. A USP isn’t what has in effect become a lottery. We had 3 cadets go flying a month ago, fist since 2019. They didn’t give a monkey’s about some poxy badge … they been flying.
Go back to pre 2014 cadets went for AEG and yes it had some level of progression the vast majority weren’t bothered, they were buzzing and done something their mates at school won’t have. If they went onto GS etc, bonus, not be all and end all.
They said it was boring flying and they wanted to do the fun flying like soaring (which cadets get air sick doing after a while, plus they go off for hours when they’d have to come back if they had cadets) and cross country (which are long sorties that cadets don’t do) amongst other things. They made it clear that they joined a flying club to fly as they wanted and didn’t want the restrictions of carrying cadets. A one off with cadets was fine but they didn’t want to fly them each weekend, it just wasn’t their job.
An interesting phrase…given the BGA sites are run by volunteers. Often these “opportunity flights” can lead to the Cadets joining tge club privately so can be a great benefit for the club.
But i do get what the pilots mean…if their passion is long flights thrn what appeal is their for sub-25 minute hops?
Imagine giving the older cadets (who aren’t FSCs) an opportunity to do some soaring or cross country flights though? I’m sure I would’ve absolutely loved that back in the day.
Is soaring/cross country part of the new gold wings syllabus?
What isn’t clear in this post is that they didn’t do 8 flights, each silver wings would have been around 35/40 launches as well as each gold wings taking an additional 20 launches (according to the official recommendations by CGS)
I completely understand why everyone wonders what the VGS do and i wont lie sometimes due to staffing their can be some very small taskings but what many don’t realise is all the additional launches required to train new instructors and maintain the standards of the current ones.
To put it in perspective after gold wings a cadet needs an additional 509 flights before they can go for a G2 test. They then complete an additional 50 launches where they learn to fly in the back seat and perform basic instruction.
That minimum of 100 launches before being an instructor means that lots of flying, especially when their is 4 aircraft as described in the first post on here, goes to staff training to bring the VGS squadrons back up to adequate staffing numbers post pauses and covid.
Unfortunately it is mandated by the DHO, GASOS and other relevant documents to the Viking and 2FTS, that gliders cannot leave gliding range of the airfield and so cross country is not allowed as land outs are considered an aircraft crash to the VGS squadrons.
They will have likely been mostly from Little Rissingtons catchment as Ternhills catchment has been divided by Topcliff, Syerston and Little Rissington