They look fragile. They look like you wouldn't want to touch one in case you broke it or put your finger through the wing. If you were to lift one off the ground in your hand, you'd notice you were lifting no weight. And holding it in your hand, you definitely wouldn't want to rotate its nose down vertically and drop it because it would probably shatter into a million pieces.

But that's not quite the case.

These things bang and bash into each other all the time, sometimes they collide head-on. Our pilots land them on the landing target by diving them in vertically. It's not uncommon for two gliders to physically man-handle a third glider out of the air and down onto the deck. Despite that, in the two years we've been flying these little gliders competitively, we've never bruised one, never hurt one.

That's a product of two dynamics interplaying with each other. We have very skilled pilots flying in the competition, and the robustness of the purple gliders is almost surreal.

In the early days of the competition, the pilots flew the gliders as if they were fragile aircraft. They flew them gently. Landings were always slow and delicate. Getting them back down onto the ground in one piece was always considered more important than landing anywhere near the landing target marker.

But things have changed. We've allowed the gliders to teach us and they've taught us well. They've taught us they can do things we've never seen another glider do. They've taught us how to fly them properly. For example, they've taught us at exactly what altitude and at exactly what speed they're comfortable diving vertically into the ground from. Get that part wrong and you've lost your glider.

We have some of the country's better pilots flying in this competition and they're smitten with the glider. They've been smitten for a couple of years. That wouldn't be the case if the glider wasn't an extremely efficient performer. These gliders can hook into a thermal from a hand-launch and climb to cloud-base.

How-ever, there's one distinct weakness in the overall package, a weakness that visits its presence upon us almost every competition round. We launch the glider via the bungee launch-line supplied with the kit. The glider might be masterful but the launch-line is a joke. Way too easily broken. If you simply cast a glance over the bungee, it disintegrates. In keeping with the light-hearted nature of our competition, we've encompassed this joke. We grin and bear it. We wish we didn't have to. Perhaps one day we'll decide to customise our bungee lines, strengthen them, but until then the competition philosophy dictates that we use the default kit components, nothing more.

We use a glider called the Fling. It is an ARF kit by US outfit, Great Planes Manufacturing. Specifically, we use the 4 foot wingspan model. In Australia, the kit retails for around $100 and, at least locally, is only available in purple.

The aircraft has a wing area of 285 square inches, weighs about 6 ounces and has a wing loading of around 4 ounces per square foot. It only requires 2 channels, rudder and elevator. We're using a bank of NiMHs tucked into the nose for our power source, along with micro-receivers and micro-servos.

The aircraft launches vertically from its launch-line; except when it doesn't: as already mentioned, the bungee line is problematic. But even if the bungee breaks half-way through a launch, all the pilot has to do is, basically, nothing. The aircraft spits out its end of the launch-line, recovers itself to level flight, then heads off sniffing out thermals. These little gliders are so perky, our pilots are capable of winning heats even if they've suffered a launch failure.

When our competition started, we had four pilots. Now, two years later, we've got a lot. Not one pilot who has decided to join the competition has subsequently left, a measure of just how addictive this little glider is and of how much fun we're all having with it.