Gliding (eBook)

From passenger to pilot

Steve Longland (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Crowood (Verlag)
978-1-84797-444-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Gliding is for everyone who has ever dreamt of riding the air currents with the view stretching to the horizon, and with barely a sound to disturb the moment. Written by an experienced instructor, this book guides you through the first steps to realising that dream, and goes on to explore the many opportunities offered by this compelling and existing sport.

Steve Longland's thirty-year career as an instructor has included being chief instructor of the Cambridge Gliding Club and a regional examiner for the British Gliding Association. He holds a Gold Certificate Badge with the coveted three diamonds, continues to fly solo and has amassed 5000 hours in gliders and flown approximately 90,000km cross-country, both abroad and in the UK.

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Introduction

Of all the dreams of mankind, flight has to have been one of the very best. Like much else, success and familiarity have reduced it to another rather humdrum piece of technical furniture. Yet, as any half-decent pilot will tell you – if they can keep a grip on their embarrassment – the dream-like qualities that made the idea of flight so compelling in the first place still exist. They are part of mankind’s symbolic pursuit of freedom and remain as powerful as ever; promising the possibility of escape, however temporary, and a teasing glimpse of what it must be like not to be forever stuck by the feet to our own dark shadow.

Gliding, as part of sporting aviation, offers a vast range of experiences, from the unusual and stunningly beautiful to the occasionally rather average and intensely frustrating – as illustrated by the following description of two contrasting flights.

ANGELS TWO ONE

The radio is off: there is no need to speak to anyone at the moment. The distracting chatter rippling out of other gliders flying across country hundreds of miles further south seemed to be largely about lunch and sandwiches, and questions about whether John has set off to retrieve Mike from yet another off-field landing. The slightly irritating squeak of the variometer’s audio – the reedy little ‘voice’ of the instrument that tells the pilot whether the glider is climbing or not – has also been silenced: the needle on the dial says ‘going up’, which is enough. As tellingly, the air through which the glider is flying has been well ironed somewhere during its travels: even the minute tremblings of turbulence that can be felt and heard in the smoothest air lower down have completely vanished.

The glider responds to all of this by being whisper quiet, seemingly suspended in the bright and secret centre of the world. A few barely audible background sounds remain, reminding you that this is the real world: the subdued rush of the airflow over the glider, the gentle hiss of the oxygen entering the rubbery-smelling face mask via a small balloon that swells and collapses rhythmically with each breath, and every so often a creak from the perspex canopy as it contracts in the cold.

Slowly the altimeter winds through 18,000ft. Is this the day finally to gain the third and last Diamond for the coveted Diamond badge? Not quite there yet: it needs a gain of height above the release from the launch of at least 16,400ft. Past attempts have included several ‘not quite there’ moments – rising into the gloomy centre of large clouds where strong lift can propel the glider upwards at huge speeds, to emerge suddenly with a bright visual ‘pop’ from the side of a snow-white tower into brilliant sunshine at 15,000ft, or 10,000ft – always just short of that magic figure.

It is an hour since take-off from the Deeside club’s site at Aboyne in Scotland. After release from the aerotow the flight was a bumpy ride in the rising air below the cumulus clouds, quickly spiralling up to their base at 3,500ft – then a dash forwards through the swirling fringes of one cloud’s upwind edge to make contact with the lee wave off Morven. Millions of tons of air blow against the western edge of this hill and are forced upwards; once over the summit this enormous mass of air then plunges downwards – but if the weather conditions are right, as they are today, it bounces up and then falls again. Like the ripples trailing downstream of a large and barely submerged stone in a swiftly flowing river, these gigantic standing waves form a train which can stretch for hundreds of miles. In other parts of the world where the mountains are higher, these waves can rise to well over 50,000ft. On this day every hill in Scotland is triggering a wave, resulting in a complicated pattern of aerial hills and valleys which, marked by cloud or not, are like elegantly smoothed, often exaggerated, but occasionally rather approximate copies of the ups and downs of the ground below.

In wave.

Unlike past attempts at Diamond height there is no need to ‘fly on the instruments’, head down in the whirring cockpit, submerged in a cold and damp world of grey. Today the sun beats down – but although the cockpit seems warm, cold feet remain a problem because they are hidden in the darkness under the instrument panel. Thicker socks would have been a good idea.

From the ground, the 50ft span glider, facing into a 45kt westerly wind, is hard to see, little more than a tiny motionless white cross set into the brilliant blue ceramic of the sky – but from the cramped cockpit the pilot is presented with a view that is spectacularly vast. This is not peeping sideways out of the tiny, prison-like window of a commercial airliner, but being immersed in an immense and archetypal landscape through which it is possible to move almost as you wish. Far away to the south lies Edinburgh, hidden in the gloomy depths beneath an unbroken sheet of dense and blindingly white cloud. To the north the air is incredibly clear and dotted randomly, way below, with flocks of small, sheep-like cumulus clouds. Just visible in the far distance are Elgin, Inverness, and the curve of the east coast which leads from the Moray Firth, away to John O’Groats.

The dividing line between the starched linen-white world to the south and the richly stippled realm of greens and browns to the north lies straight down the Dee valley. Flying directly above this division creates an odd sensation, as if the glider and pilot are stitching the two halves together. Yet what overwhelms this odd yet not entirely untruthful conceit of the brain is not so much the view – which is of glass-like clarity – but the extraordinary stillness.

The altimeter needle crawls past 21,000ft – enough height to gain that final Diamond, and with sufficient margin to make it certain. The silence is unbroken by applause.

THE HAIRSHIRT IMPERATIVE

By contrast it is the middle of summer, at Gransden Lodge near Cambridge. The sky is blue and slightly hazy, the visibility rather poor, and the wind fresh from the east. By about midday the sun has done its best to create the upgoing currents of air or thermals that gliders need to stay airborne over the region’s chessboard landscape. When the thermals do finally appear they are rough, as if quality control has taken the day off – probably gone to the seaside to escape the heat. Someone already airborne has reported that none of the thermals has so far reached beyond about 2,500ft, and even from the ground pilots can see that today cross country flying, even soaring locally, is going to be hard work. But there we are - if you like cross country flying you will go and do it even if the conditions are difficult, and occasionally just because they are.

First a winch launch. There are none of the helpful cumulus clouds which usually signpost rising air, so it is a bee-line away from the airfield towards a faint and milky patch of haze in the sky which indicates a possible thermal. The glider feels skittish and the air is full of subdued noises and bumps and thumps a-plenty, as if herds of small grumpy animals were charging past, insulting each other as they go. This is rather bad news, because a usable thermal requires billions of these turbulent little beasts – the air molecules – to act together on a grand scale. It seems an impossible coincidence that they should ever do this, but luckily it is nothing of the sort; though whether they will co-operate in time to prevent a return to the airfield and an early landing is another matter.

Abruptly the glider bounces upwards. As if it has been suddenly pinched, the audio lets out a startled squeak, indicating that the glider is climbing and must now be banked swiftly and steeply to spiral tightly into the very narrow central area of good ‘lift’, a normal feature of thermals. Today these are narrower than usual, and the direction in which the blustery wind is blowing at different heights has cut into each one and shredded the rising air into jolting and disjointed fragments so that one moment the glider is climbing, the next it is not. The audio registers ‘up’ in a series of desperately unmusical and stuttering blips – like morse code stuck on the dots – and then shortly afterwards ‘down’, which comes out as a suitably mournful wail of despair. Judging by the occasional gleeful and smug little burble it makes, it seems to be taking some joy in all the teasing.

Gliding is a wonderful sport, but on days like these you can sometimes find yourself wondering why you bothered to take off at all. After about three hours of being bumped around, never climbing fast nor managing to rise above 2,800ft (and only getting that high once, just), nor having travelled very far away – ‘Well I never, there’s the airfield again!’ – and unable to shelter from the sun’s unrelenting blaze in the cool grey shadow of a cloud, is it time to give in and land? The water bottle is empty, and in terms of vigour and enthusiasm, so is the pilot.

Gliders circling in a blue thermal.

60 miles visibility. A fairly rare occurrence in the UK.

Your non-gliding friends will tell you what a fantastic day they had at the seaside – amazingly all the children behaved themselves – and say cheerfully, ‘Must have been good gliding!’ Indeed it was, you might reply with the merest hint of sarcasm, but somewhere else in the world. Still,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.8.2012
• Zusatzinfo: 160 colour photographs & diagrams
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport ► Motor- / Rad- / Flugsport
• Schlagworte: engineless • Flight • Flying • glide • Gliding • Pilot • Runway • Silence • Thermals
• ISBN-10: 1-84797-444-9 / 1847974449
• ISBN-13: 978-1-84797-444-0 / 9781847974440