At 02:12 05 September 2005, wrote:
snip
Now I was in our club's lowly 2-33, which has that
huge aluminum wing.
Has anyone ever tried this in a sailplane that doesn't
have any big
metal parts? I'm not so sure they could see a glass
ship...

--Tom

During my power training a few years ago, flying at
about 4,000ft on top of scattered cu, the radar information
service from a now defunct airfield warned us of 'intermittent
stationary radar returns in your 12 o'clock, no height
information'. We didn't see anything as we flew on
over a gliding club. The only possible source of the
returns was from gliders thermalling under the cu we
were flying over.

Metal gliders are rare over here so they would either
have been glass or steel tube fuselage gliders. They
couldn't have been that high either as cloudbase was
only about 3,000ft.

The gliding club is 28nm from the radar airfield.

Ed.