Gliding In Selby, North Yorkshire – Burn Gliding Club
For many years, I spent my time high above Burn Airfield, just off the A19 near Selby, alone in a single-seat glider. No engine. No noise beyond the wind and the air slipping gently over the wings. Just me, the sky, clouds, birds of prey, and the quiet joy of pure flight.
Burn Gliding Club is where a love of aviation that had lived in my heart since childhood truly took root – and where it grew wings. My father flew free-flight model aircraft, and my earliest years were spent on RAF airfields around the country, watching hundreds of modellers chase the dream of flight. As a family, we would tow the caravan north to Thirsk and spend long summer days watching gliders launch from Sutton Bank, their white wings climbing effortlessly on invisible currents of air. Even then, I knew I wanted to be up there.
Time moved on and life with it. Living near Leeds, I found myself one day near Selby when a glider passed silently overhead on finals to land. Within minutes, my car turned into Burn Gliding Club. One flight with an instructor was all it took. I joined that same day.
What I soon learned was that Burn is more than concrete and grass. More than farmers’ fields crossed by three runways. Set beneath the wide skies of North Yorkshire, it is a place layered with history, purpose and emotion.
Long before gliders traced gentle arcs across its sky, Burn was RAF Burn, later RCAF Burn – a vital wartime airfield during the Second World War. From here, Halifax bombers of the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force lifted into the darkness, engines roaring as young crews headed north and east across the North Sea. Many never returned. Even today, if you stand still long enough, you can feel it – the weight of bravery, the quiet courage, the sense that this ground remembers.
That history gives Burn its soul. One of my instructors, Tony, once told me as we soared together high above the airfield how, as a young boy, he rode his bicycle down those quiet wartime runways, arms outstretched, imagining flight. That love never left him, and never has.
Where those heavy bombers once thundered along the runways into the night, gliders now rise almost silently into the same sky. The contrast is powerful. The same air. The same horizon. A different purpose – but the same deep respect for flight.
Burn Gliding Club exists to share that magic.
For those new to aviation, nothing compares to a first winch launch. You sit in the front, an instructor behind with full control. The glider accelerates rapidly along the runway, the wire tightens, and then the ground falls away. The sky fills the canopy. With a lift and a click, the wire drops free, the instructor checks it is away, and with that the freedom of flight becomes yours. You are no longer travelling. You are flying in its truest form.
Training at Burn is patient, supportive and rooted in tradition. Instructors teach more than aircraft control; they teach you how to read the sky, to feel the air beneath the wings, and to work with thermals rising from sun-warmed fields below. Many professional airline pilots took their first steps into aviation this way – and many of them began here.
Flying a glider strips aviation back to its purest form. No engine. No shortcuts. Just skill, judgement, and a quiet partnership between pilot, birds and air. Share a thermal with red kites or buzzards and it feels less like conquering the sky and more like being invited into it.
There are moments aloft that stay with you forever. Circling at 5,000 feet above a patchwork of fields, having worked thermals to get there. Hours spent alone in warm summer air scented with oilseed rape; winter launches with snow blanketing the ground below. Each flight teaches patience, awareness and respect. It teaches you something about yourself that you never knew existed – a deep, deep love of the sky.
Gliding is also remarkably accessible. It is far more affordable than learning to fly powered aircraft and offers a unique connection to the skies – and to those who once flew from Burn in wartime. It changes you, quietly and profoundly.
Although I can no longer fly, having stepped away some time ago after a serious illness, Burn remains close to my heart. I now attend Selby parkrun, which follows the perimeter track beside runway 25. The skies above still feel familiar. I believe the airfield holds the echoes of wings past and present, and the memory of those who never came home.
Burn Gliding Club is more than a flying club. It is a bridge between history and hope. A place of teamwork, shared passion and knowledge passed from one generation to the next. A place where volunteers give their time freely, not for reward, but because aviation matters. Because history matters. Because giving someone their first taste of flight is a privilege.
If you have ever looked up and wondered what it would be like to be up there – really up there – Burn Gliding Club is where that question will be answered. It is not done loudly. It is not done dramatically. It doesn’t need to be. It is done honestly, quietly, and beautifully.
A place to learn. A place to remember. And a place to discover that sometimes, the truest freedom comes without an engine at all.