One of the classic gliding bucket list items is to fly the mysterious Morning Glory cloud formation in Australia!

Barry Hendy and Grizzly Adams decided to make an adventure out of it in their Phoenix U15 motor glider VH-GHX.

The base for exploring the morning glory is Burketown, an isolated outback town, Queensland, just on the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria where the Morning Glory forms.

The first job is getting there! A mammoth multi-day flight across central Australia, some of the most remote and inhospitable terrain in the world.

This is where PureTrack comes in, combining ADSB and a Zoleo satellite tracker to give complete coverage right across Australia. There sure aren't any cell phone towers out in the middle of no where! So satellite trackers are the only option.

The safety tracking of the Zoleo and PureTrack is critical when flying over such vast areas. If they have to land unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere, rescuers will know exactly where they are.

All the hard work and planning are worth it, to experience the incredibly rare roll cloud. They only happen at certain times of the year, and rarely in a reliable way throughout the world. Burketown is one of the few places you can hunt them down.

Some pilots can spend a week or two waiting for the glory to arrive, but it never does. This time Barry and Grizzly got lucky.

The cloud moves inland over time, and the gliders can ride it like a wave system. It's plenty strong enough for the motor glider to turn off their motor and feather the prop, and they can soar just on the rising air currents in front of the roll cloud.

Their trip can be followed anytime live on PureTrack at:
https://puretrack.io/?a=VH-GHX

Check out a video of the flight reaching the morning glory on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVeWg_IaIOs

And if you're planning an epic adventure, on air, sea or ground, use PureTrack to make it easy to share your adventures, and always be found.