Yorkshire Gliding Club
community sports / aviation club
The Yorkshire Gliding Club (YGC) operate from an airfield on Sutton Bank in the North York Moors National Park, England. The airfield site is 7 miles (11 km) east of Thirsk along the A170 road and just south of the National Park visitors centre at Sutton Bank. The club formed in 1934 from an amalgamation of gliding concerns from the West Riding of Yorkshire and has been in existence for over 80 years and has had many famous fliers such as Nicholas Goodhart, Amy Johnson and Fred Slingsby.
The club's location, on top of Roulston Scar and Sutton Bank over the White Horse of Kilburn, and the sheer drop away of the cliff, has made it a notable aircraft launching point. It is the most popular gliding club in the north of England.
History
Sutton Bank had been in use as a glider launching site for 25 years before the YGC was formed and had also been used by Slingsby Sailplanes to test their aircraft. The first official recorded use of the site was in 1911 when Erik Addyman launched his self-built glider off the edge of Sutton Bank. The Yorkshire Gliding Club was formed in April 1934 as an amalgamation of the Bradford Gliding Club with the Ilkley and District Gliding Club by Phil Wills, Fred Slingsby and Norman Sharpe. The club moved to Sutton Bank in the second half of 1934 when they negotiated a lease on the site from the land owners (it was owned by the Church of England) with the site being perceived as second only to one at Dunstable in the development of British gliding. However, in the early days of gliding the airspace at Sutton Bank was deemed of far greater value as its launch site was 600 feet (180 m) above the ground level at the bottom of the cliff compared to Dunstable's 200 feet (61 m) clearance.
The public source identifies “Yorkshire Gliding Club” as community sports / aviation club. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Yorkshire, Gliding and Club.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65091589. Authority coordinates are 54.231, -1.209. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1934 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yorkshire Gliding Club” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.