Following Gareth down the long, straight lane to Baileys Farm in the Buckinghamshire village of Long Crendon, it's not immediately obvious to me where our destination lies. We pull into the driveway, park up next to a big farm building and are immediately greeted by a couple of VERY vocal dogs! Even Gareth, who's a very canine-friendly person, looks into my car from the sanctuary of his, with mild concern etched on his face!
Eventually Gareth braves it and opens the door and is immediately swamped by a couple of doggies seeking nothing more than some fuss and attention!
Aside from a very small 'Zulu Glasstek' sign on a door, unless you already knew, you'd do well to guess what lurked inside!
Pete's apprentice, Dave, emerges from the building to lead us into the workshop where the man himself is in the middle of performing an engine change on 'Sierra Tango', one of the Silence Twister aircraft that he's operated on the airshow circuit in the UK and beyond since 2008, initially as a solo act, then as an element of the much vaunted Swift Aerobatic Display Team, and most recently, as a completely new act going by the name of the Twister Duo.
For the purposes of this piece however, we're going to focus purely on Zulu Glasstek, although there will be some areas of overlap!
Founded in 1989 by Pete himself, Zulu Glasstek provides a composite glider maintenance and repair service, also doubling up as the UK agent for German-based glider manufacturer, Alexander Schleicher. Initially run from the same turkey shed once used by John Edgeley to manufacture the first prototype of the Edgeley Optica, Zulu Glasstek soon moved to bigger premises near Princes Risborough, before setting up permanent camp at its current location in 1995.
As we wander out through the open workshop door the grass-strip that had been until now obscured by a hedge becomes clear. In the field immediately to the left are some horses, while the strip itself rises away to a hump in the distance. With the sun beating down for the first time that day, it's a lovely view.
The landscape's not always looked quite like this though, as Pete recalls:
"When we first arrived we essentially bought three fields in a row and that horrible little house, which my wife always says is an old peoples' home, so we took the hedges out between the fields and kept some sheep. That worked quite well until one day I was flying around in the Fournier RF4 and needed to make an approach from the other end. Now, the ground drops away around 70 feet at the far end of the strip, so I was coming into land way below ground level and then sort of popping up on to the farm. Sadly I didn't really give the sheep the chance to move out of the way, and I ended up with most of the flock on one side of the gap and a couple on the other, and just as I was about to touchdown I thought 'bollocks'!
I then did perhaps the most stupid thing ever and opened the throttle up fully! The two sheep hit the front of the aircraft - they disappeared roughly where the spinner was. I turned right at the end of the field and my wife, who was looking out of the window, saw me going around the corner with a humungous hole in the wing and a great big lump of leading edge hanging out of the RF4! It was a bit uncontrollable and I was resigned to the fact that I was probably going to crash on the other side of that hedge, but luckily it sort of held together, and once I got the airspeed up it handled okay, although it rolled one way continuously. Fortunately I got it down safely, but anyway, after all that, I fenced it!!"
The concrete in front of the opposite side of the building from which we parked has a number of glider trailers sitting on it, and Pete opens one up for us to have a look at. Inside is a Schleicher ASH-25E, which Pete tells us would have cost 'about a quarter of a million' to buy as new. Clearly gliding is not a poor man's pursuit!!
Walking back inside for a cup of coffee, Gareth and I get our first glimpse of the glider side of the workshop. On a wooden jig in front of us sits G-CHNF/315/BGA 4066 - a Schempp/Hirth Duo Discus. It's wingless, canopyless and missing the horizontal part of the tail-plane. In the adjoining room is G-DDXX/580 - a Schleicher ASW 19 B - in a similar looking condition.
Even though there's a grass strip outside, Pete says it's easier to take the gliders he's done work on to the gliding club at nearby Bicester to perform post-maintenance test flights.
So where did this fixation with gliding stem from?
"I come from a family of glider pilots. My step-father represented England for over 15 years racing gliders, my brother, Leigh, was the 2006 World Standard Class Gliding Champion and still remains the youngest holder of the title, and my wife, Sally, is the only woman to have ever won the British Standard Class Gliding Nationals.
"Growing up, my step-father used to mend gliders, so as a kid I used to work with him and then I carried it on. Basically I've been around gliders for most of my life, since about the age of 13 I think."
On the various benches around the workshop lay an assortment of moulds and unfinished pieces of carbon fibre, the vast majority of which are Twister related, but the principles are still the same.
"Basically what you've got there are two layers of carbon, a layer of glass on each side and then bands - two layers of uni-directional cloth, which take the load of the tube downwards, and another layer of uni-directional cloth running across, and it's this that gives it its strength. As you can see, it's not very heavy," Pete says, pointing to a Twister tail-wheel casing.
In fact, there's good reason for Twister 'bits' being in such an abundance in the workshop. Pete's redesigned a significant number of the components on the two aircraft he flies.
"While I would never claim that the Twister is my design - it was clearly the work of two brothers in Germany - it wouldn't be stretching it to suggest that in the two aircraft that we display there's almost as much of 'me' in there as there is 'them'.
"We make loads of bits, the seat, the cockpit, new engine mountings, the cowlings, the undercarriage retraction system and the stick; apart from the basic airframe almost everything's different."
Some of these modifications are catching on too and, while they've not been adopted by the manufacturer, at least two examples of the Twister destined for this country have been ordered minus various components that Pete's produced himself.
Holding up the mould used to create one half of the tail-wheel, Pete says: "That's probably worth about £500. The bloke who buys the tail-wheel fairing will pay about £300 for that as it is, without the wheel or fittings. Essentially what he's paying for is the fact that what we're making is in very limited numbers. There's probably only ever going to be ten made from that mould, and it is quite time consuming. You're probably looking at 35 minutes to make each half of the fairing, an hour to join them together, another hour to get the tubing in at the right angle, and then another hour to paint."
Aside from Pete's apprentice Dave, who's recently announced his intention to move on and become a commercial airline pilot, Sally, his wife, who's responsible for spares, is the only other person actively working for the company.
"The glider repair side of the business is as quiet or as busy as I want it to be. The big issue that I have is that it's such a specialist field, with so few people doing it, that there's absolutely no point in me bringing in somebody new to train up if I'm going to be off doing airshows and things. It's not something that you can leave an inexperienced person to do on their own. You could go away for two days at Bournemouth or wherever and come back to discover that you're left with what amounts to little more than a pile of scrap! The other big thing is that we never do the same thing twice, which makes training doubly difficult.
"There are probably only four or five glider businesses like us in the UK and we'd probably be regarded as one of the biggest in terms of turnover. We do everything, right up to massive jobs like putting the backend of one on to the front end of another."
As we discovered earlier, gliders, particularly high-end ones, don't come especially cheaply, so how has the sales part of the operation been affected by the current economic situation?
"On average we used to sell about ten gliders a year with an average price of about £80,000. Nowadays we might sell two if we're lucky. I think the people who tend to buy gliders are the same sort of people who'd go out and buy Ferraris or ocean going yachts, and while they're not exactly poor, they're not feeling desperately positive about the economy. I'm sure the market will come back once the Euro rate starts to change back in our favour, but the reality is that when I was a kid there were about six glider manufacturers and now there are three, and there's not really room for the three that are left; there's probably only room for one in effect. Each year that goes by another one seems to disappear.
"Luckily Schleicher, who we're obviously heavily involved with, is the oldest running factory, it used to supply gliders to the Luftwaffe, and their chief designer was the same guy who designed the Messerschmitt Me163 Komet, so I'd hope that their future is perhaps a little more assured than some of their counterparts."
Regularly in the workshop from 0700 and often for a twelve-hour plus stint, it's clear that Pete loves doing what he does. Of course, it's not all work and no play, as you'll find out when we publish the Twister Duo piece!
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