My Overnight Success…

...Or how I went from joining a gliding club in 1994 to winning a World Championship Silver medal in 2022 and being the top-ranking UK female glider pilot! by Claudia Buengen

Most glider pilots seem to get into the sport because a relative, mum, dad, grandma, is or was a glider pilot. Nobody in my family is a pilot, I have no aviation background other than as a small passenger in big jets (from when I was 5 weeks old, as my dad’s job took us to live in various Asian and African countries). After my dad died we returned to Germany and my mum had to bring up my sister and me on her own, maybe that’s why I was never confronted with gender stereotypes until I was much older – if there was something we wanted or needed to do we just got on with it, whether it was a typical “girl” thing or not. 

But how did I get into gliding? I was at uni in Cologne and met people from a small gliding club 2.5 hours drive away. They talked me into having a winch launch. I told them this was a ridiculous idea as I am really (really!) scared of heights. They persevered, I took the winch launch, flew, landed, signed up as a full member. (Still scared of heights now, btw, but I’m fine at 12,000ft in a glider.)

I was in the middle of doing a translation degree in Cologne, the club was 200km away, so my progress was rather leisurely: I had my first launch in May 1994, soloed in October 1994, then I went to London for an Erasmus semester. From summer 1995, while writing my dissertation (a gliding terminology list) I still continued to glide when I could, consolidated my solo flying, did my first few soaring flights and progressed enough to gain my gliding licence in the autumn of 1996. 

The next couple of years I didn’t do much flying as I’d finished uni, spent 2 months in Spain to improve my Spanish, then moved to Munich for a job – now I lived 4 hours away from my club, and closer ones were too expensive. And I didn’t have a car.

I’d always wanted to live abroad again for a while, and in 1998 I found a job as a translator in Slough, of all places! And then I obviously had to find a gliding club in the UK. The Oxford Gliding Club at RAF Weston-on-the-Green was the one – similar to my old club, small, affordable, friendly. A “proper club”. Weekend only, winch only, volunteer only.

It was there that I did all my advanced training and was introduced to cross-country flying by an enthusiastic club member who took me on several flights in a two-seater. Fast forward a few years, I’ve met my future husband Nick (he owned a wooden Ka6 glider I acquired an insurance share in – we did the annual inspection together and our hands met over the castellated nuts and split pins, aaw…), I’ve become an instructor, and I fly cross-country. But competitions? They are for the Big Boys and Girls at the Big Clubs. Not for folks like me from a tiny club. 

Until I was introduced to the Women’s Development Team, the predecessor of Women Gliding, a volunteer initiative originally started to get more female pilots into cross-country flying, competition flying and maybe even into the British Team. They talked me into flying my first Regional competition, the Northerns at Sutton Bank in Yorkshire. That was fun, and I didn’t come last! 

From then on I regularly flew Regionals and slowly improved. Always ably supported by SuperCrew™ Nick, who would patiently help me rig and grid the glider, and collect me after my flight, either from the airfield or from a large number of random farmers’ fields. Cue the women’s development team again, who decided I’d flown enough Regionals and should try a Nationals. In theory one has to qualify to fly a Nationals, by doing well in a Regionals, but National competitions have been undersubscribed for over a decade now, so I got in and took part in the Club Class Nationals at Husbands Bosworth, in 2010. And again didn’t come last! Woohoo! 

This was much more fun than flying Regionals, where I was usually in the lowest performance glider and therefore would only see my fellow competitors in the start sector, and then again in the bar. In the Club Class Nationals I was surrounded by pilots in similar gliders, and kept seeing them all the way round! So now I flew Nationals instead of Regionals (I only had time and money for 1 comp a year) – and again slowly improved… until I qualified for my first Women’s World Gliding Championship (WWGC), which took place in Issoudun, France, in 2013. This first one was possibly the most fun – there were no expectations as I was one of the two newbies, we had the most fantastic team, crews, (including a motivational coach and a team chef & masseur!), and team captain.

I had got this far thanks to all the support from my club and from Women Gliding and its predecessor. By the time I first qualified, the British Gliding Association (BGA) had done away with the concept of a National Coach or structured team training, so most of the training I received was whatever my fellow team mates and I managed to organise ourselves.

Now of course I had caught the “international comp bug” – they are a bit like a giant school exchange, but without the weird host parents. I love the international atmosphere & seeing my mates from the various other countries’ teams, and I did my best to keep qualifying to fly more of those competitions, and managed to finish in the top 10 in my first four Women’s Worlds. 

Luckily I’ve got the best crew imaginable – and he happens to be my inspector, too, and maintains my glider. I know, I’m spoilt. If our accommodation is close to or on the airfield he’ll even get up in the morning to grid the glider by himself while I’m having a lie-in. Having a good crew is so important, as is having a good routine. At least for me. I get stressed if I have to change my routine in the morning, and I’m likely to forget something vital. 

So why do I fly competitions? Actually, I have a love-hate relationship with comps. I get ever so stressed. But they are strangely addictive. I guess I like the acknowledgement, the validation that I’m a reasonable pilot.

But WWGC is also quite hard work – it’s two weeks of daily flights lasting up to six or seven hours, sometimes with only one rest day in the middle. 

After competing in WWGC in France, the Czech Republic, and Australia, COVID hit – we just about made it back to the UK before the lockdowns. So everything ground to a halt, flying-wise. But the next WWGC was to take place in the UK – at Husbands Bosworth even, where I had flown several Regionals and also several Nationals! So I thought I might be able to do well. 

By this time I’d joined the London Gliding Club at Dunstable, a bigger club with a bigger competition focus, so between lockdowns I enlisted the help of a fellow club member and former British Team member, and we did a lot of ground stuff together. In addition to that, G Dale, author of “The Soaring Engine”, a series of 4 books about cross-country flying, agreed to support Women Gliding and the newly formed Women Gliding squad. We met online during lockdowns and on an airfield when we were allowed to fly again, and all this seemed to pay off when in the Husbands Bosworth competition before the Worlds, six of the top seven places were taken by women!

In 2022 I also managed to secure a place in the mixed British team (or the “men’s team” as the uniform supplier called it 🤷‍♀️) to fly in the European Championship in Lithuania, so I was as prepared as I could be by the time the Women’s Worlds at Husbands Bosworth came around. One fellow team member in Lithuania kept joking about how I was using the “men’s” Europeans as a practice comp for the Women’s Worlds!

What a fantastic competition the 2022 Women’s World Gliding Championship was! During the practice period and at the beginning of the comp we had fantastic weather conditions, 10,000ft cloud base, 9kt thermals, high speeds,… and then the weather turned a bit more British. Which is what I’m used to. I had a few off days but on the last day I narrowly avoided a field landing in deteriorating conditions and tiptoed home to the airfield, where it turned out I might have won a Bronze medal! In the Women’ World Gliding Championship! 

Lots of people had landed out so logger traces were sent in in drips and drabs… and the scores kept changing slightly. At first I was 10 points behind my fellow Club Class competitor Ines from Germany. Then 5 points. Then 3 points. Then level with Ines. And then my British Team mate Alison sent her trace in, the only one still missing. And suddenly I was one point ahead of Ines!

I had won a Silver medal!! In the Women’s World Gliding Championship at The Gliding Centre at Husbands Bosworth, in 2022! In my LS1-f Neo, in the Club Class! And that’s also how I ended up being the top-ranking UK female pilot (which I currently still am). I'm even still in the top 20 of the international female ranking list, in 17th place. 

These things are annoyingly fleeting, though, and as I missed the first day of the Club Class Nationals last year due to my nephew's wedding, and the last two days this year due to a non-flying injury (I’m fine now), my UK ranking points won't be that great this year. 

So while I have met the qualification criteria I may not be in the group of 4 pilots (BGA rules limit it to 4, they may allow 6, the official limit set by the International Gliding Commission is 9) who are allowed to go to the Women's Worlds in the Czech Republic next year. 

I had thought about “retiring from being a top international athlete” after 2022, but the Silver medal automatically qualified me to fly in the next one, in Spain, in 2023 (for which Transair kindly supported us with ICAO charts – we ended up being the only team who had proper charts!), and Spain was a great experience, too, although a bit terrifying with limited landout options. You can see from my results how I put the brakes on after a second place on day 1, as I realised how poor the fields were. 

Let’s see what’ll happen in the coming years. I could always just take a break and get back into it in a few years. The beauty of gliding is that your competition career doesn’t have to be over once you hit your 30s or 40s (though it does get harder, for various reasons). Or I could retire gracefully and enjoy fun gliding expeditions to Wales, Scotland, Germany, Slovenia…