Sackville Farm

This is a real farm strip, certainly not for the faint hearted! The airfield is marked on the 1:500000 charts and is found a couple of mile NNW of the old military airfield at Bedford (aka Thurleigh). The airfield is primarily a glider club but has a few powered types housed there, namely our C140, a Cherokee 235 and a FalconAir. The gliders use winch and aero-tow and can get very busy at times. It must be said that there is very little around the area for anyone visiting, it's in the middle of nowhere! The strip has one runway orientated east/west of about 600m of grass. It's usually mowed but is does undulate a lot. The west end of the field is considerably higher than the east end with a fairly steep incline at the last couple hundred metres. When arriving at Sackville it's important to avoid certain areas for noise abatement. You should never fly over the village to the east side of the field (this makes approaches to the westerly runway very tight), also never fly over the big house with the lake off the NW corner or the house off the SW corner on the edge of the woods.

Never overfly the runway or use overhead joins because of the winch launching. Circuits are normally to the north of the runway and very tight. The glider pilots like to be able to see anyone in the circuit from the ground. There's no radio, or signals square but there is a winsock about mid-field on the south side. Circuits are usually flown at about 600 feet.

Fuel: There is no fuel available.

Contributions to this page from David Sansom.
This should not be used as a source of authoritative information for flight planning or safety purposes. The Air Pilot should be referred to for up to date information.