Forty years ago I did a gliding course at Duxford, near Cambridge.

It started badly.

The instructor said that in all their years Duxford had never had an accident and asked what that proved.

‘That one was due,’ I suggested, helpfully.

Now I confine my curiosity about flying to touring our Cotswold airfields (20 of them) and talking to fliers.

Since man first trod this earth he has looked upwards and longed to fly like a bird.

Gliding is the nearest you can get to that and certainly flying an unpowered aircraft successfully from one side of the country to the other and back in just a few hours is the nearest thing to bliss that aviation has to offer.

It requires years of practice, an appreciation of the sheer poetry of silent flight, and guts.

Listen to that sound. It is 7,000 glider pilots groaning as they see the air-grab that threatens the future of gliding.

Commercial and military aviation both want more of what is finite, and the space for southern-based gliding clubs is being squeezed.

Most long cross-country gliding flights pass around Brize Norton and Oxford.

So when Osprey, a development company, applied last year for a huge expansion of airspace in what has quietly been renamed ‘Oxford Airport (London)’ there was a shudder of despair.

The area around Brize is not infinite; go north and you bump against Birmingham and Daventry airspace, further east, RAF Benson, south, the Salisbury Plain danger area, and Cardiff-Bristol. Make the traffic island bigger, plus a new airport, and aviation is squeezed into yet narrower corridors and through tighter pinch points, none of which is safe for gliders.

While we are all conscious of the dangers of land being grabbed and, in a sense, lost forever, spare a thought for what is happening in the sky.

Next sunny day, when you look up and see the majestic twirling of a gleaming glider as, bird-like, it floats higher and higher with nothing but skill and magic powering it, think it might be one of the last you see.