Becoming a pilot had been my dream for a couple of years at school. So when I found out that Oxford had a university gliding club, I knew I had to join. Flying there felt like a dream that was suddenly… possible.
I saw the club’s poster at the freshers’ fair — among tens of other societies — and signed up on the spot. The very next week, I was there.
And it was amazing. The quiet preparation. The briefing before the flight. The take-off. And then my instructor turned to me and asked, “Do you want to try something more exciting?” He gently pushed the nose of the glider down — and suddenly I could see the ground straight ahead of me. My heart was racing. But I was smiling.
I never looked back. With the Oxford University Gliding Club I went solo — still one of the proudest moments of my life — and later served as the club’s Secretary, helping to keep our little community of pilots organised and in the air.
Some of my favourite flying has been in the mountains. On a club expedition to La Motte, in the French Alps, I got to soar along ridgelines and ride Alpine thermals high above the peaks — an unforgettable way to see a landscape.
Gliding and astrophysics turn out to share something for me: both reward patience, a feel for invisible forces, and a love of the long view. Reading a thermal is not so different from reading a signal — you learn to trust the patterns in something you cannot see.
