It is vital that you bring your personal logbook and progress card every time you visit the club. They contain details of every training flight and stage of the syllabus completed to date. Together with your instructor you will review the documents and decide the objective for today’s lesson. It could involve a new topic, refining or consolidating previous sessions, maybe practicing a technique, addressing a difficulty or simply a skills and judgement test.

The overall aim is to help you develop towards becoming a safe, confident and competent pilot.

There will always be a pre-flight briefing, on the airfield immediately before the flight. Your instructor will brief you about the main purpose of the flight, about the exercise(s), how they are to be performed, who is doing what, and what actions will take place in the event things don’t go to plan.

A typical pattern will be for the instructor to demonstrate something, explaining what’s happening , then hand over to you to try and then practice the exercise. Some exercises are straightforward, others not so. Don’t worry, our instructors are patient and everyone has had a time in their training where it takes longer than planned to progress!

After you land there will be a post-flight debrief. You will discuss the flight, the key lessons learned, what went well and what needs more attention. At the end of the training session the instructor will update your logbook and progress card so that the next instructor will know what stage you have reached.

Generally at LGC each training session would comprise of a single aerotow or around three winch launches. Some exercises are best done at a greater height or need more time so are normally done by aerotow. Others, such as Landing, you can get lots of practice with winch launching. We are fortunate to be able to offer both launch types.