BRIEFINGS

I have been a member of the London Gliding Club, Dunstable, since 1986 and was an instructor from 1989. (My ratings [FC, MGIR & BICoach] lapsed due to Covid and for various reasons I did not renew them.  Now past the allowed age for instructing and tugging anyway.) Below are some of the briefings I developed over the years. If you find them of any use I will be pleased.

My humble apologies if any of this varies from current official BGA doctrine. This may reflect the peculiar circumstances at Dunstable or I may simply be wrong. Also times DO change.  You judge.

To get the FULL EFFECT of the presentations use Internet Explorer and make sure to click on 'Slide Show' (bottom right) and then keep clicking to progress through the animated slides. (I guess the animations don't work in other browsers because PP is a Microsoft product.) Once you are in the Slide Show, to go backwards, right click and choose 'previous'. You may have to 'Allow blocked content' a few times depending on your security settings. To get out of the slide show use esc. To get out of the presentation do a 'back'.

Sadly, it seems these slides will not animate in I.E. version 9 or later unless you sell your soul to microsoft in the Cloud. Pity. Am working on it without a lot of hope! MS/Powerpoint 2013 does not appear to directly support animation on a website?! If you're still on IE8 in XP ...it all works fine!!  A classic case of improving things worse!

Or you can try the corresponding pdfs, where I've produced them.  They're not as good but better than nothing.  This is really the only option now (2022).  So much for progress!

Copies of the animated lecture slides on Principles of Flight which I used when I did this section of the Bronze Lecture programme at LGC (some time ago now).

A presentation on field landings. This was originally intended as a briefing before embarking on a first stortie in a motor glider in pursuance of the BGA Cross County Endorsement.  However it grew over the years and is now pretty exhaustive (I'm told) but far too long for a pre-flight briefing.

(For photos of crop see the Derby & Lancs Club site at http://www.fieldselection.co.uk. )

A Powerpoint presentation for instructors about teaching winch launch failures. In my view this is often taught badly and without following an appropriate sequence of incremental steps. Carefull progress checking before moving from one stage to the next is needed. Difficulties are often the result of a student receiving instruction from too many different instructors who don't talk to one another!  See Bronze Lectures (above) for more on winching for the ab initio.  Also see London Gliding Club website, Newsletter archives, for articles on the theory of winch launching ('Safety Matters', May 2008 to Nov 2008).

My take on Skew-T (and TePhigrams). Might suit your brain or you might prefer the experts' explanation which usually confuses me!

Cautionary Tales on the use of GPS and Flarm

A lot of hopeful instructor candidates on AssCat courses find these demos a challenge to demonstrate convincingly. This is my take on how to get them to work. Practice makes perfect!

The BGA patter doesn't include how to prompt. Most people will freeze when you give them control for the first time. You need to prompt. This is how I do it. Seems to work!

Author: Tom Sage...Please reproduce what you would like so long as you don't charge anything for it... It would always be nice to be acknowledged.