This event occurred at the US Air Force Academy some time ago, apparently April 23, 2014, according to this Reddit thread. This is the most informative comment from that thread:
I’m very curious as to how you got this video, i was under the impression it never left the airfield.
This happened in April 2014, this past year. The weather is absolute crap here, especially for soaring. Well… we get good weather sometimes. Anyway, it’s not uncommon for those TG-16A’s to go up with a 25 knot gust… But i digress.
The cadets were pushing in because winds were out of limits and the weather was getting worse… and BAM! Microburst.
This microburst hit right next to the airfield. The tower spotted it early, gave a verbal warning “look out…” and cadets are trained to do the following: grab a wing (glider) and turn broadside into the wind and put the spoilers out. The tows were not so easy… nor lucky. Their takeoff speed is about 50 knots, and none of them were powered up when they lifted off the ground, to give you an idea of how bad the wind was. Their only maneuver is to face into the wind and pray they dont actually take off. The tows that took off left for COS airport… it took another 30 minutes of holding gliders before the tower let the cadets start moving the gliders.
As for taking off… 55 kt gusts are the highest the Academy has had in a long time. Considering there were a half-dozen other aircraft within 100 ft of the tows, along with people (i.e. cadets around/in the gliders) if he was moving too far from his position in the queue, the safest action is to get some altitude and try and leave the microburst. Or at the very least put some altitude and distance in between himself and the cadets and aircraft. You saw how slow the tows in the air were moving relative to the ground… those were HARSH winds.
At about 0:20, you can see a cadet hanging onto the wing of a glider on the bottom of a screen. This wind was scary. I don’t know if anyone was up at the time, but full tempo ops can be up to 5 tows and 8 gliders… on a standard afternoon training day 3 tows and 4 or 5 gliders is normal. It looks like they were already pushing the gliders to the hangar…
