Skyline Soaring Club kicks off 2018 riding a wave of national recognition, with youth members gracing the cover of Soaring Magazine, five first solos and a new rating highlighted in its milestones section, and Keith Hilton's glider featured on the center fold. President Dan Ernst celebrates the club's growth with 20 new pilots in the pipeline and announces the arrival of a new Pawnee tow plane, the product of a rigorous selection process led by Shane Neitzey and Dick Garrity. The January Membership Meeting honors Dick Otis with the FAA Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award for 50 years of accident-free flight, while the club elects a new slate of officers including Garrity as President. Instructors Bob Sallada and Piet Barber offer practical deep-dives into glide performance in sinking airmass and the four levels of pilot competence, and the FAA Safety Team schedules a series of webinars and a local checkride-prep seminar at Leesburg Executive Airport. It is a newsletter that reads less like a routine January update and more like a club tipping into a new era.
The season kicks off with a safety meeting, a practice ops run, and the first flights of the year, but the real story is Piet Barber's three-attempt odyssey to Mobile, Alabama, where he battled two weather cancellations, a COPS-rehearsing neighbor in a sketchy downtown motel, and a mountain of FSDO paperwork before finally certifying three new glider pilots and crashing on the beach at fellow Skyliner Dick Edge's Mobile Bay house. The issue also marks the arrival of fifteen-year-old Maryam Ali as the club's new newsletter editor, celebrates Fernando Cuenin's private glider check ride at Bermuda High, features Jim Kellett's pointed takedown of the myth that gliders always have right-of-way, and includes a reminder to check your qualification icons before the Duty Officer has to flip through your logbook. A timelapse of the crew assembling the K, a $2,000 VABA aviation scholarship, and a 'Name that Skyliner' game (Big Ten football, Apollo last cut, 100+ aircraft flown) round out a busy first issue of the season.
The 2018 season is officially underway at Skyline Soaring Club, with eight days of operations, two Discus checkouts, and over fifty student flights already on the books. President Dick Garrity outlines the Board's evolving approach to tow scheduling and two-seater access, while a brand-new "Club Buds" program pairs six volunteer instructors with incoming students to ease them into the club. John Noss delivers a thorough, step-by-step guide for new certificated pilots ready to tackle their first cross-country badge flight, from OLC logging to glide-computer setup to a 21-mile local practice course. Jim Kellett brings back vivid dispatches from the 2018 Soaring Society of America convention in Reno, where seven Skyliners attended talks on WWII gliders, drooled over a twin-jet 1-26, and shared an OSTIV dinner with the Payne team behind the Perlan altitude record. The issue also features Hugh McElrath's practical ADS-B Out installation write-up, a monthly free-tow lottery from new Safety Officer Eric van Weezendonk, details on the May 27 Burner Family Day away flight, and Dick Edge's tongue-in-cheek announcement that "tow planes are a thing of the past"—photographed amid paragliders and RC models at Torrey Pines. A "Name that Skyliner" guessing game and a safety alert about ramp visitors round out a busy first issue of the year.
The May 2018 issue opens with the triumphant arrival of the club's new Pawnee tow plane (424BY), a 260 HP machine hauled in by Shane Neitzey from Scotts Bluff after a two-day, multi-leg flight behind a cold front, promising turnaround times of just eight minutes and the ability to carry water ballast for cross-country pilots. The centerpiece of the issue is Piet Barber's vivid, day-by-day account of competing with JP Stewart in the first-ever 20-meter multi-seat national glider competition at Mifflin, PA, where the pair endured a cancelled practice day, a land-out on a private grass strip called Snook while sheltering a Duo Discus from a hail-laden storm, a barefoot week in a tent, and a nail-biting scratch over the Nittany Mountains to ultimately finish third overall behind Karl Striedieck and Sarah Arnold. Other highlights include a 1971 1-26E (s/n 505) offered for sale, Bob Sallada's hard-won safety column on landing-related pilot-induced oscillations drawn from his F4H Phantom II test-and-evaluation career, Erik van Weezendonk and Evan Dosik's STEM outreach to fifth graders at Frederick Douglass Elementary, Clark Lunsford's Civil Air Patrol checkout in a Cessna 182, a safety alert on visitor control around taxiing tow planes, and the ongoing 'Name that Skyliner' guessing game featuring a pilot who once held the title of 'emperor,' drove a steam locomotive, served on a German submarine in World War II, and wrote the MNPS for the North Atlantic Track System.
The July 2018 issue captures the height of Skyline Soaring Club's summer season. The centerpiece is the Week of Training at Petersburg, West Virginia (Grant County Airport W99), where 180 instructional flights were launched in just over four days, students averaged 18 flights each, and two pilots—Todd Morris and Rob Jacobsen—earned their first solos amid what one student called a "week-long summer camp" of flying, home-cooked BBQ, and a power outage that turned into a hand-pumped-gas lesson. The issue also features Dan Ernst's vivid account of his first 1-26 Championship at Caesar Creek, Ohio, complete with a buzzard circling in the middle of a gaggle, a stuck flight computer, and a carrier-landing game played in a raincoat while being hosed down. Other highlights include Piet Barber's review of the long-out-of-print Soaring Flight Manual, Clark Lunsford's report on the CAP National Glider Flight Academy at Fort Indiantown Gap, Hugh McElrath's rookie tow-pilot experience, and Jim Kellett's "Curmudgeon's Corner" tale of climbing the upwind side of a cumulus cloud to 4,600 feet before diving through a narrowing cloud canyon to make a bumpy landing.
Skyline Soaring's August 2018 issue celebrates the club's training pipeline with two student members, Peter Ross and Max Fisher, earning their PPL-G ratings, while President Dick Garrity lays out a candid and forward-looking discussion on the club's glider acquisition strategy, the role of the Skyline Soaring Education Foundation, and the balance of membership categories from early teens to octogenarians. The issue also features a thorough, hands-on guide to tow-rope inspection and maintenance by John Noss, a vivid account by Hugh McElrath of a winch-tow clinic with multi-time national champion Karl Striedieck at Eagle Field, Pennsylvania, and a lighthearted 'Name that Skyliner' guessing game. A safety alert on visitor control around taxiing tow planes rounds out a newsletter that captures a club actively growing its fleet of pilots while wrestling with the practical economics of keeping its hangar full.
Skyline Soaring Club's biggest fleet news in years dominates this issue: a nearly new Alexander Schleicher ASK-21 (N321K, ~1,000 hours) is being purchased from Burt Compton in Marfa, Texas, to replace the club's Grob. Keith Hilton traveled to the 4,800-foot airfield to inspect the glider, took a 45-minute tow flight behind a Cessna 182, and reports the ship in beautiful condition with a Spin Kit, full AD compliance, and a like-new trailer. The member load-pledge drive closed two days early, slightly over-subscribed. The issue also carries a pointed safety corner from Frederik van Weezendonk following a long-landing incident in a Sprite during an ad-hoc day, a candid Part 2 from instructor Bob Sallada on student motivation and training expectations, a photo gallery from the Burner Family Day, a listing for a member-owned DG-300 (SF9) for sale, and a 2001 poem by David Brunner celebrating the joy of circling.