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Welcome to my soaring web pages my name is Ian , I flying around on the local slopes here in the South Cotswold's. My first attempt at flying models came about when I proudly presented my son Neil for Christmas, with a pre-built 1mtr 2 channel fully built up polyhedral glider, which had a blackwidow engine stuck to its nose and came with a twin stick Acoms transmitter.
After unwrapping his model we fired up the blackwidow engine with the greatest of ease in the comfort of our fully heated kitchen, boxing day morning we went to Frocester picnic area for our first flight, 'well it was the closest slope and I had no idea at that time about the necessity for correct wind direction'. So after clearing 3 inches of snow from a bench/ worktop we attempted to refuel, but the below zero temperature had turned our fuels constituency into syrup, and finally after 30 minutes of failed attempts to Fire up the engine, we elected too just giving it a good damn hard chuck, needless to say the model came down to earth within 15 seconds and took me 3 hours to repair with superglue and matchsticks!!!. The model did get back into the air on two separate occasions for around 20 seconds on each attempt, we then agreed that it should be allowed to rest in pieces via a ritual burning that took place in our back garden, and that was the first and only time we really seen it go up.
Two important lessons were learnt with that model, the first, Neil found out that his dad did not know, and could not do everything, and secondly I learned that I needed a vast amount of instruction. Neil gave up at this point, but undeterred I purchased another 2ch model called The High Sierra, which I took along to Selsley common, where I could see other models being flown by experienced modellers. I approached the slope feeling like I would be intruding on the flyers and getting in their way, but I could not have been more wrong. Warmly greeted by Bryan the S.C.S.A chairman who checked out my new model for flight readiness, after increasing the nose weight and elevator movement, Bryan felt it best to pass my personal flying instruction into the hands of another club member already confident with the twin sticks mode to which my Acoms transmitter was restricted, so he introduced me to Phillip Hayward.
And I have never looked back, Phil has since that very first day become not only a tutor and an inspiration , but also a great personal friend, who has continued to provided hours of teaching to many novice's that have turned up on the slopes, reflecting the help and support ethos that runs throughout all soaring community's across the uk.
The main purpose for setting up this web site is to have a Reliable Broadband portal for the sharing of both the short video clips and photographs I take whilst flying with other like minded friends. So although I may include the occasional model review from time to time, the main objective of my site will be media led, leaving the flying tuitions, 'does and don'ts', to those who already extensively cover those aspects of this great hobby on their web sites...
For anyone who is interested in this activity weather you are a complete novice or an experienced wizard with a full history of crashes under your belt, I strongly recommend taking a look at the South Cotswold Soaring Associations web site, this is a local club that I and 80 or so other members belong to. The information you will find on the S.C.S.A web pages positively reflects the wealth of knowledge and experience's that its members have gained over the passed few decades.

I do my best to insure that every video clip plays in windows media player but if you should find that the clips refuse to play on your standard media player then please go to my getting started page, found under my 'home' drop down menu. Here you will  find useful information about the photography and video content I use, along with links to a great little media player, and the all the correct wmp codec.

If you click around my site and have any questions that relate to its content be it about model flying ,or the Image compression settings used when rendering the clips, then please feel free to use the 'email me' link, and I shall do my best to answer all of your questions.