Birla Gliding Club
The Birla Gliding Club is one of the few interesting things that Pilani has to offer to someone, who is looking for a peaceful place outside the campus to visit on a lazy Sunday morning.
Positioned just outside the south-eastern gate of the BITS Pilani campus, the Birla Gliding Club was once an impressive playground for certain elitist factions of society, which, owing to a fatal accident a decade and a half earlier was closed down. Today it serves as a place that people can go visit, look at the sun rise or set depending on the time of the day, put on a pensive expression on their face and avoid being run over by the BITS BAJA team's indigenous All Terrain Vehicle, which is often driven here for testing purposes.
You can identify the Gliding Club by the distinctive "airstrip" that you can see just south of the campus.
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And lo, that's not all, the Gliding Club is also home to a few helipads which are used, interestingly, to this day.
After three and a half years of being marooned here, I finally put an end to my streak of utter lethargy and laziness and decided to pay a visit to this much talked about place. I have absolutely no idea why I hadn't gone there all this while, because it is scarcely twenty minutes away from any central point within campus. So last Sunday, following a rather hurriedly made plan, we decided to wake up in the dead of the cold early morning and make this trip.
Such trips, as a thumb rule, never work out, because, we as people from Pilani have an innate sense of inactivity and an undying love for the morning slumber. And when it's a Sunday, this sense of inactivity generally snowballs into cataclysmic levels of uselessness.
However, we were fortunate that we did manage to pull off the trip and click some really great pictures at the place. And oh! We go up, close and personal with a full fledged helicopter which had landed there the previous evening. Given the fact that the only person there apart from us, was a chowkidar, we had free access to the chopper and could scale it, peer inside and do all sort of things with it. Or well, almost.
Here's a slideshow of some of the pictures. All of these were clicked by the author on a 5 MP HTC phone camera, and have been uploaded as is.
Positioned just outside the south-eastern gate of the BITS Pilani campus, the Birla Gliding Club was once an impressive playground for certain elitist factions of society, which, owing to a fatal accident a decade and a half earlier was closed down. Today it serves as a place that people can go visit, look at the sun rise or set depending on the time of the day, put on a pensive expression on their face and avoid being run over by the BITS BAJA team's indigenous All Terrain Vehicle, which is often driven here for testing purposes.
You can identify the Gliding Club by the distinctive "airstrip" that you can see just south of the campus.
View Larger Map
And lo, that's not all, the Gliding Club is also home to a few helipads which are used, interestingly, to this day.
After three and a half years of being marooned here, I finally put an end to my streak of utter lethargy and laziness and decided to pay a visit to this much talked about place. I have absolutely no idea why I hadn't gone there all this while, because it is scarcely twenty minutes away from any central point within campus. So last Sunday, following a rather hurriedly made plan, we decided to wake up in the dead of the cold early morning and make this trip.
Such trips, as a thumb rule, never work out, because, we as people from Pilani have an innate sense of inactivity and an undying love for the morning slumber. And when it's a Sunday, this sense of inactivity generally snowballs into cataclysmic levels of uselessness.
However, we were fortunate that we did manage to pull off the trip and click some really great pictures at the place. And oh! We go up, close and personal with a full fledged helicopter which had landed there the previous evening. Given the fact that the only person there apart from us, was a chowkidar, we had free access to the chopper and could scale it, peer inside and do all sort of things with it. Or well, almost.
Here's a slideshow of some of the pictures. All of these were clicked by the author on a 5 MP HTC phone camera, and have been uploaded as is.
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