Amongst lots of wet days, overcast days, and high wind days in the last couple of months, we did have a beautiful blue sky day last weekend, when club members took the opportunity to work towards going solo, or kept their currency up to date, or fixed any gaps in their recency status. We also had a visitor flying with us from another club, which is always welcome.

What’s the difference between currency and recency, you ask? Well, currency is a way for pilots to check their safely for flying before any flight. The BGA have used a barometer for some years to help pilots assess their currency, which takes account of how many launches and flying hours we each have over the last 6 months. A nice feature of the gliding app we now use to manage the club is that each member can see their currency at any point, calculated for them, and based on the flying they’ve done over the relevant period. If we see currency is a bit low, we can have a check flight with an instructor before flying solo again.

Recency is a new regulatory requirement that came in with the introduction of the SPL licence in the UK last year. It requires all glider pilots to have completed a certain number of launches, flying hours, and flights under instruction to maintain their full SPL privileges (for example solo flying cross-country). And as for currency, our new gliding app lets pilots, instructors and the CFI see instantly whether a pilot has valid recency, so they can either restrict their flying, or use training flights to achieve recency as required.