Leszno airfield from a crew's point of view

The Leszno airfield is a grass square, roughly 4000 feet on a side. We're told that this is the largest grass airfield in Europe. It is so big that the runways are not defined until after the cones are placed along their edges. For example, Runway 06/24 can exist in four separate places, of which two (left and right) are normally used. Similarly, Runway 15/33 could be anywhere, but they normally lay it out in the two "official" places.

In the diagram above, the four official runway placements are depicted. But remember, the polygon surrounding the runways encloses nothing but grass, with clear approaches all around.

The box labelled "P" is where all 127 gliders are parked or tied down, along with all 127 trailers. This is where many of the crews wait for their pilots to return.

The normal radius for the finish circle is 3 kilometers, and the final (steering) turnpoint is usually to the northeast of the airfield. This lines the gliders up for a straight-in approach to Runway 24L, and everyone is asked to land long. If you arrive with too much altitude for a direct landing, you can do a right-hand circuit for a landing on 24R.

Crews, who want to be abeam their glider when it comes to a stop, are often seen racing around the southwest end of the airfield to get to the right place. They do this in both directions, at high speed, while looking at the sky. This is the most dangerous part of flying at Leszno, in my opinion!

Yesterday, we had sudden strong winds from the south, and the operations team never had time to move the cones from Runway 24 to Runway 15. This resulted in some confusion on the radio for the pilots who had never had the experience of landing on 15, and for the crews, who did not know where to go without creating a hazard.

DB made a nice landing directly into the wind, more or less on Runway 15R, coming to rest about a third of the way down the runway. His measured wind speed on final approach was 38 knots. I raced out to fetch him, receiving my clearance to cross the airport diagonally while I was already halfway to the glider.

The next part was surreal. We were cleared to tow directly to the parking area via the grass between runways 15R and 15L. As we progressed on this route at walking speed, several gliders touched down on our left and right, with a groundspeed only a little bit greater than our own.