National gliding competition to soar over Benalla

Terry Cubley, an experienced competition pilot at the Benalla-based club, is assisting with organising the national competition.

As a previous competitor in world championship events, Cubley is excited to see a major event taking place in Benalla once again.

“It’s probably a couple of years (since the last nationals in Benalla),” Cubley said.

“It’s (the Gliding Club of Victoria) a good site, and we’ve got lots of members, so we can hold a national championship because we have the size to do it.

“We’re expecting about 22 who’ve entered, and normally, we’d expect about 30 to 35, so it’s a bit lighter on, but we’ve just had a world championship in NSW and another nationals in Queensland.”

While there may be fewer competitors than normal, that does not mean the competition will be any less fierce.

Cubley said that while the sport provided spectators a different viewing experience, it still produced the drama that spectators loved.

“It’s an exciting sport,” he said.

“It’s not like a running race where you see them going past you, so you don’t get a clear view, but by using the tracking, you can get a real feel for it.

“This competition is actually the qualifier for world championships this year in the United States.

“So, for a couple of classes, the main classes that will be operating, the pilots will be seeking selection on the Australian team.

“So there’s a fair bit of interest.”

The reason Benalla has been given the opportunity to host the national championships is because of the large number of experienced members at the Gliding Club of Victoria.

Cubley said there were numerous hoops a gliding club had to jump through to be able to host a high-standard event at its base, but Benalla passed all those rules and criteria with ease.

“You need a weather person, you need someone to set the tasks, you need someone to score it,” he said.

“The advantage of Benalla is that we’ve got a reasonable number of members, and many of them are experienced with running comps, so we’ve got that background.

“You need people on the ground to make sure they get to the launch points in the right order to make sure that the tow planes are ready to go.

“We’ll only use three tow planes, so we need three pilots, but with some of the bigger comps that we’ve run here, we ran up world comps here in 2017, and we had 100 competitors. We had a lot of tow planes on that one.”

Once the gliders are up and soaring above Benalla, the competition gets under way.

A typical task set for competitors from the Gliding Club of Victoria is to fly to Jerilderie or Deniliquin, then across to ‘The Rock’ or Mount Beauty and complete the lap back to Benalla.

The classes of gliders that will be over the skies of the Rose City in a couple weeks’ time include high-performance gliders that fly at 160km/h for about four hours.

This means that while they might start in Benalla, the competition will also be playing out in skies 500-600km away.

So, how can Benalla locals get the best spectating experience?

Cubley said there were a couple of options.

“The council has restrictions on people coming on to the airfield, but spectators can certainly look at it from the fence near the gliding clubhouse,” he said.

“If we have got enough people to supervise, we can bring people on to the airstrip to have a closer look.

“When we launch them at the airfield, they’ll fly around there while they gain height.

“There’s also some tracking available, so you can actually see where they are, just like the Sydney to Hobart race.

“So then people can see where the gliders are, where they’re going, who’s winning, who’s losing, and you’ll see them when they’re coming back.

“They’ll (the gliders) probably be coming back around 5pm to 6.30pm in the evenings, and that’s when they’ll come low over the airport or land, so it gets a bit hectic for a while.”

Head to https://glideandseek.com/ or download the Glide and Seek app to track gliders when competition gets under way on January 15.