Weak Link

Learning to fly gliders at a club airfield on the Swabian Jura, from the first winch launch to the practical test, with every launch counted.

Who writes here

I grew up in Cork and came to Stuttgart in 2019 to work for an engineering firm, and for five years the nearest I got to flying was the window seat on the way home at Christmas. In the spring of 2024 a colleague took me to his gliding club, on a grass airfield on top of the Swabian Jura, forty minutes from our flat. I had three launches that day in a two-seater with an instructor behind me, and I joined the club before I drove home.

This is my logbook in longer form: launches, minutes, heights and mistakes, from the first circuits through the cable-break drills to the first solo and, in September 2026, the practical test. The training was all in German, which has done more for my German than five years of office meetings. The title is the weak link, a small metal link in the cable just ahead of the glider, designed to break before anything else does. On some Saturdays it felt like a fair description of me.