That sounds like great preparation for cross country for club members
using club equipment.Â* Private owners, on the other hand, have much more
flexibility to explore on their own and, possibly, to break their
ships.Â* I was fortunate in that another club member with the same type
of glider took me by the hand and led me around a cross country course.Â*
Then it was a matter of going further away and testing my new found skills.

And yes, I landed out a few times.

On 5/29/2019 3:00 PM, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Wed, 29 May 2019 08:51:26 -0600, Dan Marotta wrote:

Really?Â* Four hundred actual off field landings?Â* Or low approaches with
the engine running?Â* There's a big difference (unless the engine quits
during the go-around).

UK rules: no solo XC without a cross country endorsement on your bronze
badge, so the Bronze is the first prerequisite. This requires 50 solo
flights of which at least two must be soaring flights of 30 mins or
longer, two written papers + flying tests.

XC endorsement requires instructed flights covering navigation, field
selection and field landings plus a 1 hour and a two hour soaring flight.
In my club we do everything except the two soaring flights in a Scheibe
SF-25 TMG flown normally for navication and field selection exercises
and with enough power on to approximate a 30:1 glide for the landing
practise - the student picks the field, flys the circuit, base and finals
and the instructor takes over and climbs away at around 100 ft or so as
soon as its obvious the is well placed in the field and (obviously) takes
over somewhat earlier if the student has got it wrong. All three
exercises are repeated until both instructor and student are happy.

FWIW in my club new solo pilots are encouraged to start work on their
Bronze as soon as they've converted to an SZD Junior. We have two,
primarily for early solo flying. The Junior pilots are also encouraged to
work on their two Bronze duration flights plus the Silver height and
duration tasks as part of their pre-Bronze flying because all these can
be done while staying local to our field.

Like all my peers, I'd done the Bronze duration flights as well as Silver
height and duration before I got the Bronze XC Endorsement and then flew
Silver Distance in a Junior on the next day that the duty instructor
thought conditions were suitable. This all happened within two weeks of
me completing the field landing exercises, so they were reinforced nicely
because the task I was set was to fly to another gliding club 60km away,
which I'd never previously seen, and land there.



--
Dan, 5J