A month of glider towing

Roughly 40 hours in the tow planes, 12 hours of soaring, nearly 300 tow flights, not bad for a quiet month.
It's actually getting a lot busier now, and the nice weather does help a lot. We've reached 32°C (90°F) last week, way above the average for this time of year.

The airfield is home of the national soaring centre, we get all the different teams training with us for this summer's championships.
Last week was the female week, and the previous one was focused on the Soaring National French Team.
A dozen of young glider pilots are also here every week-end as part of the "young team".
Also on the airfield are about 30 german pilots along with dozens of pilots from other countries.
Needless to say we get very busy at times, especially around 12:30pm where up to 8 tow planes (3 of them belonging to the French Air Force as they have based 15 gliders on the airfield) and 2 winch launch trucks are used to put all those gliders in the air.
Everything calms down around 3 pm, and we usually get to tow another dozen of gliders between 4 and 5.

Most tow flights last between 5 and 11 minutes, with an average of 8 minutes, and a tow for an aerobatic flight is done in 12 minutes, 11 minutes of which are spent in the climb and the remaining minute is enough to loose 5000ft and land ...

When we are not in the plane, we're either in a glider or in the control tower, or watching the gliders high speed fly-by's which can be pretty amazing!

Airborne life continues...