Several DSC members have commented that I have been rather conspicuous by my absence on the hills recently. Some also know that the reason is the time I have been spending at Camphill learning to fly sailplanes. To say I have enjoyed every minute would be at least misleading, but I seem to be hooked, so that's that.

Paragliding's great, so why fly sailplanes? Paragliding's great when the weather's great, but in Britain? - Not so often. At Camphill they can fly in winds up to about thirty knots, and although we can sometimes get up in wave on paragliders this is pretty scarce. Why not hang-gliders? - Too heavy for Superwimp!

The best way to get started is to have a trial lesson. As a HG or PG pilot you had better make sure you get one on a day which is likely to be soarable. A trial lesson at Camphill comes with a months' free membership during which you can continue training as a normal club member at club rates. This gives you a chance to find out if you can deal with the various problems associated with learning before spending lots of money on an annual subscription.

Learning isn't easy though. See if you can get over this lot before getting too excited.

Catch number one, the hardest part for most people. If you want to be reasonably sure of a decent lesson you have to get up early in the morning and get your name on the flying list (sorry Marion).

No problem? Catch number two. There is an awful lot of work to be done to keep everything going. At the present time I have flown about 32 hours dual and 28 solo but I've probably done a number of times that in tractor driving alone!

Catch number three is that the better the weather, or perhaps more correctly the better the weather forecast, the more competition there is for club gliders and training resources. Ideally you want just the right number of people on the field to make sure all the jobs get done and everyone has a good fly.

Catch number four, the worst. Sometimes things just don't get going very well on the airfield. You can drive tractors all day and end up with a really short, lousy lesson in which you feel as if you've learnt nothing. When this happens several times in a row despair sets in and many people quit.

There are things that can help. A week's gliding course will give you a guaranteed minimum flying time and once you have gone solo you'll have much more access to machines. In soarable conditions solo pilots using club machines will agree with each other about how long each can have the aircraft. Usually this is about an hour, which, in the early stages, is probably a sensible limit from the safety point of view anyway.

Plus one. You can fly in a far greater range of conditions than paragliders or hang-gliders. My skin condition was what set me on a search for something which would allow me to make use of poorer soaring conditions and sailplaning certainly does that.

Plus two. Even if conditions are not soarable you will usually get some sort of flying done. In the early stages simply getting the thing airborne and landing properly is a big enough challenge anyway.

Plus three. You don't have to follow the weather from site to site so much. In my current job I do enough driving and it's nice not to have to drive much at weekends as well (except tractors of course!).

Plus four. On light wind days you don't have to wait for a thermal to come up the face of the hill. With a thousand foot lob you can search quite a bit of sky for a thermal before landing and then have another go if you don't find one. It's great taking a thermal from just behind Bradwell Edge and looking down on a bunch of hang-gliders and paragliders sat waiting on the (illegal!) take off.

Having done a fairly large amount of paragliding it's interesting to make comparisons. Whether these constitute 'catches' or 'plusses' will depend on why you fly.

One of the criticisms most often levelled against paragliding by rigid winged pilots is that the wing can collapse. This I have simply regarded as one of many hazards to be controlled. Don't be fooled though. Sailplanes seem to have at least as many hazards of other kinds. The outstanding difference in safety is that the amount of control of the learning process is much greater. i.e. There is a sarcastic b_____r in the back for a lot of the time! The club at Camphill has a large pool of dedicated instructors who will pull you out of all sorts of interesting scrapes. Once I went into 'paraglider mode' and attempted to scratch unusably weak lift low down along Bradwell Edge until the instructor quietly reminded me that he would prefer to fly back to the airfield rather than walk!

The teamwork needed to keep things going can be quite fun. Although the club can seem very closed it contains a broad spectrum of people as does the Derbyshire Soaring Club, but with much more contact between members. It is well known that for socio-economic (posh word for cash) reasons the average age of glider pilots is quite high which can make the club seem a bit conservative. Despite this the membership definitely benefits from the greater time and effort that many of the older pilots are able to put in to the running and general upkeep of the airfield, as well as their flying experience.

Peter Harvey has shown us how well skills transfer from the foot-launch disciplines. Having started last October I had hoped to make a cross country flight this year but lack of free time has prevented me from making fast enough progress. (OK, so I'm not always the quickest learner!) Nevertheless, at the time of writing in mid August, I've more than over 14 flights of over an hour. Not being cleared for cross-country I currently have to stay within gliding distance of the airfield, but with a glide of over thirty to one this gives me quite a scope. I have been to Sheffield and back, but being 10 nm from the airfield is quite scary enough (even without encountering Pat Dower on his paraglider on the way!) until I've got the field landings sorted.

As a reasonably experienced paraglider or hang-glider pilot you will already be able to find and exploit lift and have a good idea of what is going on. There are plenty of exciting new things to learn and do in sailplaning, so if you think you might like it then you just have to give it a go!

This article has a secondary purpose. There have been complaints from hang-glider and paraglider pilots continuing to use Bradwell Edge about sailplanes flying dangerously close to them. The last thing the D&LGC wants is an air to air accident and I can assure you that the club will take whatever steps are necessary to prevent this. I did come across one pilot visiting from another club who started talking about aggressive flying with hang-gliders and I did make it very clear what I thought of such behaviour and what action I would take if I found out who was involved. The vast majority of pilots at Camphill were quite happy with the situation that existed before the control of Bradwell Edge was taken away from the DSC. Most are quite sympathetic about its loss but the intrusion by hang-gliders and paragliders into areas immediately around and over the airfield is seriously eroding that goodwill and has already had a negative effect. The problem is that Camphill is one of the most difficult sites in the country. Although large, much of it is sloping, rough and rotor prone so that for any given conditions only a relatively small area may be safe for landings with westerlies demanding particularly cool and accurate flying. Couple this with the number of inexperienced pilots training at Camphill and you can begin to see the problems of extra hazards on approaches and overshoots.

The final message must be that whatever their disciplines, all soaring pilots share common goals. Let's make sure that a few cowboys don't spoil things for the rest of us.