Once a month many of our good pilots get together to have a laugh and let their hair down. They fly identical purple gliders; gliders impossible to tell apart in the air. They use an ARF kit from an American manufacturer. The gliders are extraordinarily robust, agile and extremely efficient aircraft. And at $100 a kit, the laughter comes cheaply.

Take-off is simultaneous, the gliders climbing out vertically, wing-tip to wing-tip; an impressive sight, the line of gliders often stretching across the airfield.

Landings are also simultaneous, but whereas the take-offs are wing-tip to wing-tip, the landings are even more crowded. Each pilot is trying to land his aircraft exactly on the five minute call and exactly in the centre of the landing target. There's only the one landing target. As the timekeeper calls four minutes, thirty seconds, things get busy.

The gliders jostle and bustle one another, each pilot trying to set his craft up on the perfect landing approach. The antics the pilots get up to during this stage of flight are often hilarious. And extremely creative. Two gliders will team up and, using physical contact, try to herd a third glider out of the way. A comedy starts playing itself out. All the pilots are smiling to themselves or laughing aloud as the final phase of each heat unfolds.

In recent months, their landing techniques have evolved yet again. In an effort to hit the centre of the landing target, they're now diving their gliders vertically onto it. Perhaps that should be into it. If there hasn't been much rain during the month, the gliders just bounce off the target. If the ground is soft, the noses of the gliders lodge into the soil and remain there, the fuselages sticking vertically out of the mud until their pilots walk over to pluck them free.

Despite all the mid-air collisions, in the two years we've been holding the competition, not one aircraft has been damaged.

Excellent pilots, remarkable gliders.