Greater Lafayette Sailplane Guild???

[tlcglider]

I am trying to find out if the Greater Lafayette Sailplane Guild is still a going concern?

There are several web pages with links to their web site but those links are dead and a web search does not return a new site.

I am near Winamac Indiana and Lafayette is 55-60 miles away. This would be the closest sailplane club to my location. Mapquest shows LOFT in Fort Wayne to be 110 miles and the AMA field used by MIST to be 130 miles, so it would be a lot easier to go to Lafayette more often.

Thanks

Lincoln

[Purdue Aero Man]

Only flying club I know of in the Lafayette area is the Lafayette Cloud Dancers.

[tlcglider]

Thanks Purdue Aero Man,

I was checking on the net and apparently the person who created the club was a PU student. The http address was www.ecn.purdue.edu/~aweston/... etc Probably a student or staff web site and he probably was moved on now. :(

Oh well....

Thanks anyway!!!

(that url is dead, don't bother clicking it!)

[rdwoebke]

Holy cow! I have not thought about the GLSG in ages! I was a founding member. I'm not aware of any ongoing sailplane activity in Lafayette. I belive the field we used to fly at has been turned into residential area. If you send me a private email, I will send you names of a few Purdue people that might still be there flying. I currently live in Carmel, Indiana. I fly with an informal bunch of glider, electric glider, and parkflyer pilots at a public park in Carmel.

You also might want to call Hobby Time (not town) in Lafayette. They could tell you if anybody is flying gliders locally.

Good luck!

ryan

[rdwoebke]

Holy cow! I have not thought about the GLSG in ages! I was a founding member. I'm not aware of any ongoing sailplane activity in Lafayette. I belive the field we used to fly at has been turned into residential area. If you send me a private email, I will send you names of a few Purdue people that might still be there flying. I currently live in Carmel, Indiana. I fly with an informal bunch of glider, electric glider, and parkflyer pilots at a public park in Carmel.

You also might want to call Hobby Time (not town) in Lafayette. They could tell you if anybody is flying gliders locally.

Good luck!

ryan

[tlcglider]

Bummer :(

I was kind of thinking that the club must have desolved. I doubt the web link would have gone dead if the club was still active, but I wanted to ask before I gave up on it.

The LOFT in Fort Wayne club has been around for a long time and has contests, so I guess I will give them a try. 110 miles each way to the club field will limit my visits though!! The Purdue campus is about half that for me.

Also there is the MIST club at Muncie, but that's even farther and more difficult to get to. The drive is almost entirely 2 lane, except a short segment on I-69.

Winamac has a good sized power plane club and it has a 800' paved runway. I have also had enough of glow fuel. The field is about 6 miles from my place and every year they have a BIG r/c jet fly-in. Somehow I don't think I want a 300mph jet in the air at the same time as my glider!!

Thanks for responding!! :D

Lincoln

[rdwoebke]

It was a tough proposition for the GLSG to survive. Being made of students, we graduated and moved away.

I fly with both LOFT and MIST. Both are great clubs. You would enjoy contests at either. They are laid back, but you will learn a lot. They both hold monthly club contests.

I have not been to Winamac, but you might also want to consider the SOAR club in Chicago. They are VERY active, and have a lot of excellent contest pilots. I checked your town out on the map, and you also might want to consider flying at Mount Baldie. It is a great slope on the Indiana side of Lake Michigan. I'm not aware of a club per say that flys Baldie, just an informal band of slopers.

Ryan

[tlcglider]

I am glad to hear the about LOFT and MIST. SOAR fields are on the OTHER side of Chi-town if understand the maps correctly. That would make visiting they a "special event". (I have gone through that city many times, just don't care to go anymore).

I flew at Mt Baldy in the early 1990's. Lots of fun and great lift when the wind blows right. I will never fly a plane there again that does not have some sort of air brakes(flaps, spoilers, flaperons, etc). Let me explain: I was flying a stock Sig Ninja on a pretty good day there. Amazingly, there were no other gliders or even hang gliders there that day. After a long flight, I decided to land, so I got in position, turned around to see if the landing area was clear and it was. So I swung out east and back towards the ridge of the dune, watching only the plane. As I got to the landing area I suddenly noticed a woman that was walking into the way. My choices were to roll into the rotor or bank harder inside the turn. I did the latter, and cought a wing tip and cartwheeled the plane right in front of her! Scared her half to death, and sure scared me. What if I had hit her in the head? Don't even like to think about it, even to this day. Point of all this writing is never fly this slope alone, you need extra eyes, after all it is part of the national park system and it can be popular with vacationers. You need landing brakes to slow down to allow you time to react to non-flying people. They don't know what you are doing and are just there for the view from 200+ feet.

Hey Thanks for the reply!!

Lincoln