The Fleet Air Arm may have long gone from the old HMS Daedalus airfield near Gosport, but there are still Naval fliers soaring into the skies there on a daily basis.

Today the sprawling site at Lee-on-the-Solent, in Hampshire, lacks the hum of activity that marked its days as a Naval air station, but there are still more than 6,000 flights made from its runways each year.

Portsmouth Naval Gliding Club are the busiest – but not the sole – tenants of the former Fleet Air Arm base by the shores of the Solent, which closed nearly a decade ago.

The inventory of aircraft is modest – a dozen single and two-seater gliders and a tug to get them airborne – but almost daily you’ll find the aircraft aloft.

“We are trying to raise our profile, particularly among serving personnel,” said Capt Nick Lambert, who works on the staff of Fleet Headquarters in Portsmouth.

“We think of the club as the best-kept secret.

“The beauty of gliding is the teamwork. You don’t just climb in a plane and head off. You rely on a team: the person looking after the winch, the guys in the galley, the guys recovering the glider when it lands.

“Once you get the gliding bug, everything else takes second place.”

The facilities are rather different to those used by the Fleet Air Arm in the station’s heyday. The gliding clubhouse is a bus with the rear section converted into a canteen, and the hangar was once used by Whirlwind helicopters and Gannet aircraft.

Daedalus has been home to the club since the mid-50s, and the club itself dates back to 1947. HMS Heron and Seahawk have counterpart gliding associations, all operating under the banner of the RN Gliding and Soaring Association.

The Portsmouth club is 300 strong, but only around one third of the glidermen and women are serving personnel; the rest are civilians or ex-Forces, like tug pilot Chris Joly, a former marine engineer.

“Powered flight is boring. This is wonderful by comparison. It’s a battle against yourself and the elements,” said Chris.

In ten years WO2 ‘Cat’ Stevens, of HMS York, has gone from a novice to a pilot who competes at Inter-Services level, and he has well and truly got the gliding bug.

“You say you’re popping down the airfield for half an hour and will spend four or five hours there,” he said.

“When you are driving around you find yourself looking at the fields for places to land and at the clouds. You look at the weather forecast in an entirely different light. Once you get involved in gliding, you want to do it every day.”

When the weather allows, flights occur almost daily from Daedalus.

If conditions are not at their best, flights may last only 20 minutes or so before the glider returns to the take-off field.

But when the thermals – rising currents of warm air – are strongest, experienced pilots can remain aloft for hours, covering hundreds of miles.

Gliders need to be towed or winched into the air in order to seek the thermals. A ground-based winch will take it to around 1,700ft, while a tug aircraft will release the glider at 3,000ft or so, after which the glider pilot is on his or her own.

“Seven out of ten times you will get back to the airfield. If not, you’ll land in a field and wait to be picked up,” said Chris Joly.

“You really don’t want to land in a field – then you’ve got to buy the ground crew’s meal in a local pub.”

Last year, there were more than 6.300 glider launches from Daedalus. The club shares the airfield with Hampshire police’s spotter plane and a Coastguard rescue helicopter.

The glider pilots clocked up more than 17,000km in the skies of southern England. Only the RAF’s gliding club at Bicester – a seven-day operation, unlike Lee-on-the-Solent – is a busier centre of unpowered flight in the Services gliding world.

Details of the Lee-on-the Solent club are available from www.pngc.co.uk or on 01329 287552.