On Friday, 24 April 2015 11:45:06 UTC+3, Don Johnstone wrote:
The other caveat is
that if you have given your airframe a really cold soak, when you descend
into the cloud you will pick up ice, clouds tend to have moisture, which
may be a complete game changer.

Gliders fly pretty well with ice. You get ice in pretty much every climb to FL80-FL100 in my latitudes, most of the time there is few centimeters of rime ice on leading edges. You notice this while climbing as the airspeed starts to creep up while maintaining same turn rate and pitch attitude. I have only once noticed unusual friction with controls, and that was actually outside cloud. Cloud was apparently bit warmer and water droplets ran to aileron gap, and then froze outside cu in colder air. TE probe usually is the first to get ice, and if you don't have a variometer with electric compensation you probably loose the thermal soon. Pitot probe icing means it's time to open airbrakes and get out of the cloud asap. But at that point you have ice all over wings. It should be obvious that glider with icy wings glides like a brick, and in cold airmass ice melts sometimes at disturbingly low altitude (bug wipers are very good for wiping melting ice).