This article has been copied from the Darling Downs Soaring Club website.

FLARM is an enhancement to the see and avoid principles but is also a real enhancement to pilots’ situational awareness.

We must continue to use good lookout techniques and develop effective scanning habits.

The information below has been reprinted from the aus-soring mailing list. The message was posted by Lisa & Peter Trotter. 

Giorgio Galetto is currently ranked 18th in the world. He has been Italian National Speed Champion 10 times and National Distance Champion 12 times. He has also been a member of the Italian National team since 1984 andrepresented his country eight times in the World Championships. In 1999 he took out the overall World Champion title. Giorgio currently holds five Italian distance and speed records and in 2004 flew 1,350km over the Alps in his Ventus 2ax. He placed 4th at the recent Worlds in Sweden. Giorgio is also a full time glider instructor and coach.

We had a very successful day of winch launching at Bacchus Marsh yesterday, Saturday August 26th. All three clubs participated which was just great to see. The majority of our instructors are now current on this most economical ($ 7.- / launch) way of getting into the air.

The cooperation between power traffic, aerotow and winch operation was examplary. I believe we have shown that winch launching at our great facility can operate without undue impact on the other activities.

Ross (CFI) has commenced planning for the next winchday in 4 weeks time. See my photo gallery for some images of the day. 

A new component - GGC Chat has been added to the portal.  If you are logged in to the site, you can type messages that would be visible to other users who are also logged in. You can have a conversation with other members who are on-line.

The chat box could only be seen after you logged in to the web site. 

Using the GGC Chat is very simple. Just type your message and press the Send button or hit the Enter key. You can use emoticons such as :) ;) etc - they will be converted to graphics.

Two video clips have been published on the popular YouTube website featuring Air Experience Flights in the GGC’s Puchacz VH-OWL. The videos had been shot during our Easter Camp at Porepunkah:

• Glider Land

• Doing a Loop in a Glider 

The sixty or so members and families from the three gliding clubs who were present at the clubhouse last night (22/07/2006) were treated to a very pleasant evening. After a well-catered two course spit-roast dinner eaten in a relaxed and convivial atmosphere, guest speaker MacArthur Job entertained us with recollected experiences from his extensive, varied career in aviation. This ranged from flying Dragons with the flying doctor service in the outback, charter operations spotting tuna in NSW and South Australia, to producing and editing the Aviations Safety Digest and other aviation publications. "Mac" has several published books related to aircraft accident investigation to his credit and is still writing about aviation these days.

The evening was rounded out with conversations around a splendid bonfire, some fifteen metres across with six-metre flames lighting up the district.

Thank you and well done to Kevin McGowan, Neil Thompson for organizing the dinner and bonfire respectively and to the members who helped.

A new component has been added to the GGC Portal that allows writing comments under all published news items.  To prevent spammers access and anonymous comments, this feature is only available to registered members, however anyone can read comments entered by the members.

There is an option to restrict both writing and reading comments to the registered members only. Please let me know how you feel about it - via your comments...?

The Site Info page now has a section with stats on the Most Commented Items.

A new component – Private Mail - has been added to the new GGC site:

http://www.gliding-in-melbourne.org

It is only visible to registered members (please email the webmaster for your user name and password.

You can use it to send private messages to any other member registered to the GGC website. Once you receive the message, you will see the envelope symbol flashing under the Private Mail heading. Click on it to access your mail. It works exactly the way any other email system – you can compose a new message, check your inbox and outbox etc...