When your typewriting teacher offers a trip in a glider, the only logical answer is “me please.”
There is a good chance that we will all only cross this way once, so when your typewriting teacher says “who wants a 20 minute trip in a glider at my gliding school?” the answer is “me please”.
OK, yes, it’s not the most likely of questions for class, but what an opportunity! Thus, many years ago a group of 6th formers, including myself, found ourselves in the school mini-bus headed for a small airfield about 60 miles away.
Now, I have this theory that gliders are probably safer than powered aircraft. At least a glider is designed to hang in the sky and be capable of landing with no engine, so the notion of going up in one just didn’t bother me. However, for all that they strap you in a parachute!! When you protest that you don’t know what to do with it, they tell you it isn’t intended for use, but so that you can sit comfortably in the cockpit!!
So, I’ve drawn the last flight in the group, the others have had a great time. Now it seems there are a couple of ways of launching a glider. They either pull it up via a rapidly shortening cable tethered to the ground, or, another aircraft pulls the glider up into the sky and then frees it once its aloft. The 2nd method is better because apparently it takes the glider higher in the first instance. Without upward thermals a glider steadily loses height, so the higher it starts the better. At this airfield they are towing the gliders up with a second aircraft so we are starting nice and high – just the best experience, well I guess if you are going to do it you might as well get the best.
So here I am strapped in with an instructor behind me and up we go! It’s a blue-sky day, and it is so silent up there. Occasionally you are aware that the glider has made a flexing noise, but it silent apart from the ‘whoosh’ of air across the wings. So, the instructor takes her round banking and climbing and then we get ‘woomph’ and are pushed upwards. I’m told ‘wow! That’s a thermal I’ve seen there is a black roof down there it’s absorbed the sun earlier n the afternoon and now it’s giving back the warmth’. Yup, that warm air had kicked us back upwards prolonging the experience. So, he says, ‘we’ve got the height, do you want to loop the loop?’ Well I’m hardly going to say ‘no’ am I, so he takes her into the loop and I feel myself hanging upside down the in harness, then he says ‘look-up’ and there is this remarkable view of the land passing ABOVE my head – totally unforgettable.
OK, we’ve lost height doing that, so he goes back and picks up the thermal again, then he says, ‘do you want to try steering her?’. For the record I didn’t say ‘no’ to that either, so she’s mine, I gently push and pull the yoke and ‘wow’ I can actually feel her respond to the controls’ What an experience! In the finish he takes her back and picks up the thermal once more, does a few more dips and curves and then takes her down. We land fiercely fast on the grass runway, and huge noise and then we are back where we started.
What an experience. All these years later I can still remember it and the sight of the land appearing above my head.
Grab any experience you can get with both hands folks, you might never get the chance again.