For us, every year it's a good chance to meet up with old friends, discuss news with some of our suppliers, and also to find exciting, new equipment to add to the growing list of high quality products we offer.

It was great to see Gin Seok Song, designer and founder of GIN Gliders. He was very excited and full of energy following the rollout of a number of new GIN products including the Boomerang5, Rebel, Zulu Explorer, Yeti '08, etc and he was particularly keen to show us the new harnesses; Gingo 2, Yeti Airbag, Genie Race and the soon to be released Genie 4.

Airwave had a party for Bruce Goldsmith to celebrate his World Championships win earlier in the year. They were also showing plenty of new products like the new DHV1 Gecko, the Slingshot, a HOT new acro glider and the Alpine Extreme an ultra-lightweight, 2.7kg paraglider. The Alpine is not just for mountain descents. Fabric technology and paraglider design have advanced so much that, despite its feather-weight looks, the Alpine is a fully functioning, soarable paraglider capable of cross country flight.

Some pilots may have expected to see the first protos of a Sport 4 to be shown, but the Sport 3 is going so well both in flying terms and sales that Airwave, although they do have many ideas and protos, haven't yet developed a glider that would be significantly better and a wirthey replacement... Long live the Sport 3, one of our favourite gliders.

A new company; FlyMaster had a bustling stand with crowds of pilots eager to get a glimpse of the latest generation of soaring flight navigation software, developed to take advantage of the stronger computation power, larger memory capacity and higher graphic resolution of modern PDA's.

Together with the FlyMaster F1, Flymaster's unique combined vario/gps module, the NAV+ sorftware and a PDA, they form possibly the most complete soaring flight instrument, featuring all the necessary information either for leisure, XC, or competition flight.

NAV+ stands out from other flight instrument systems not only in the type of information it provides, but also how that information is shown and the way it communicates with the user.

It is also innovative in that everything is modular and information is carried wirelessly so that new sensors and probes can be added retrospectively as they are developed. For instance, thermal (temperature) probes are currently being developed to fit to wingtips as an additional aid for thermal (warm air rising) detection.

Flymaster are offering 3 years of software upgrades for free to buyers of their NAV+.

Check out prices and availability of the Flymaster NAV+ display software and the Flymaster F1 module.