Welcome to Lake Keepit, near Manilla in New South Wales. I've been excited about this.
Here is the home of a very special club, because we are about to double the wingspan
and lose the engine. Welcome to Lake Keepit Soaring Club.
And we're up.
Oh, this is amazing!
What is it about it that you loved, say, the first time you ever did it? Do you remember
what that experience was like? Being off the ground and it's quiet and you can see for miles
and it's just an extraordinary feeling. And I don't think you ever lose it.
Why is it one of the best places in Australia to soar? Not glide? Soar? Glide? Soar. Gliding is
when you don't gain height. Soaring is when you can gain height and travel cross-country. It's
location - it's in a wonderful location scenically. As you've probably seen flying around the place,
it's just beautiful. It offers a great variety of scenery. We have fabulous weather we have about
340 days of the year when you can fly. This is the last full-time gliding/soaring club in Australia.
So how high did you take these things? When the tug pulls you up, what sort of height are you
at and how long can you stay up? Talk me through some of the mechanics behind...or lack of mechanics
behind it. In a normal training environment, we would take an aerotow behind a tug to
between say 1,500 to 2000 feet above the ground. On a good summer's days when there's plenty of thermals
around, from 2,000 feet it's quite easy to stay up for basically as long as you like. You can stay up for
all day essentially. And around here heights of 15-16,000 feet in thermals are not uncommon. How
many of your pilots on the radio? Are they on the frequency? Do they all have radios? At Keepit, yes,
it's a club requirement that we carry radios and use them. What do you suggest they do in terms of
their calls to each other? If you adopt standard procedures and standard phraseology, you can limit
your radio calls to essential traffic. We do have a chat frequency where you can get on and
talk in plain English and have a chat about how things are going and you know what thermal's
working here and what terms working there. Right. Yeah. And so on . But when you're on the CTAF, use standard
phraseology and everything's sweet. I was amazed with what I saw this morning in terms of distances.
How far do you guys go? The absolute world record's 3,000km and that's in the Andes
in South America and they got into a phenomena called wave - wave clouds in the sky which are
similar in concept to waves in the sea. Yeah, right. But slightly different. They did about 3,000km
in about 15 hours, so they averaged 200km/h in a big two-seater. But in today's contests
we set time limits and essentially who can travel the furthest distance within that time. How have
technological advancements improved at the sport? Oh hugely. In the '50s and early '60s they are primarily
wood and fabric type gliders. Then a little glider called the Libelle was one of the first
to be produced using fibreglass, and now we're using carbon fibre and kevlar. and all sorts of
advancements in technology. When we're talking glider to glider we have a a system called
FLARM which is like a TCAS powered aircraft. The FLARM units recognise other FLARM units
and it comes up on a display in the glider which will tell you if another glider is either
above, below, behind or in front of you and how far away. It's another aid to let you know that perhaps
another glider could be a couple of kilometres away. And understand too that your eyes can be
soaring at any height. You could be 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 feet.
Yeah. Yeah. Good to meet you Ian. Pleasure absolute pleasure. I hope you enjoy Tamworth and
Lake Keepit. See you back soon. Absolutely. And we can set you up for a 5-day course
starting Monday. There you go. Sign here. Perfect. I will! Give me the paperwork.
Just fixing the GoPro for this final leg
of this epic adventure. I can hardly believe that it's come to a close. Lake Keepit to Bathurst.
And how beautiful is this place? And the guys and girls from the Lake Keepit Soaring Club,
they can fly those things so well and they're so passionate about the weather as they need to be -
they need to know all about it because without clouds, and without thermals those things don't
fly. And just the distance and the height and the aerobatics they can do with them, I'm personally
in awe of what they can do with those sailplanes. Here we go heading to Bathurst for our last leg.