August is birthday month around here, and I usually splurge on some presents to myself. In August 2006 I started planning this but then "things happened" and it fell off my radar. This year I remembered it, let my family know about it, and my sister got it for me as her birthday present to me. (thanks Julienne!)
Flying in a glider, more correctly known as soaring, is something I've always wanted to do. The aircraft are incredibly sleek, and the sight of one curving lazily in the sky is really beautiful. There are soaring clubs all over the country that offer introductory rides, costing about $100 for about an hour. There are two operations in the Atlanta area -- one in Lagrange and one in Monroe, both within an hour of city. The Lagrange one actually shut down at some point in the past year or two, so now it's just the Monroe operation, aka the Mid-Georgia Soaring Association.
Run by volunteers, it's a bunch of guys, mostly older, who get together on weekends to go soaring out of the Walton County field in Monroe. Some of the members have their own private gliders, which they keep in trailers at the field or take home, but most of them use the four club-owned aircraft that they've invested in over the years. Almost without exception these are German-made aircraft, as the Germans developed world-class gliders in the wake of World War I -- following which they were prohibited from developing powered aircraft as part of the Treaty of Versailles.
The club has a small hanger near the airstrip with the four communal aircraft jammed in there. It was fun watching them slowly untangle the delicate knot of 4 gliders that they'd managed to fit inside. Two of them are single-seat models, and two are tandem models used for "discovery" flights like the one I was to take.
The Schleicher ASK 21 is the model that I flew in. As you see from these photos, these gliders are light enough to be moved around by a couple of guys. After some basic checkout of the controls and flight surfaces, each glider got hooked up to a
tow vehicle (e.g. golf cart) and the long walk out to the end of the airstrip began.
Also operating from that airstrip was the local skydiving operation and the occasional private aircraft. Otherwise it was quiet, with all of the glider guys assembled at their little place to the side of the airstrip, and the tow plane waiting on the other side. As gliders were ready to go, the tow plane would fire up, a tow cable would be latched onto the nose of the glider, and off they'd go.
Gliders are not allowed to sail through clouds. On a cloudy day, this means they have to glide below the cloud deck (bottom of the clouds). When we showed up at 11am, the guys were standing around looking at the sky and muttering about the low deck (around 2500 feet), but they expected it to rise as the day wore on, and it did.
There were two other people there renting flights but I got to go first. I managed to cram myself into the cockpit (barely), got a VERY quick introduction to the cockpit (mostly how to get ventilation and get out later on), got introduced to the pilot (Walter, retired from Delta Airlines) and got underway!
After some brief radio chatter, the tow plane fired up and pulled us down the runway and up into the air. We actually lifted off the ground well before the tow plane did, rising up a few feet before the tow plane had reached a speed where it could take off itself.
These tow planes are "all engine", as the tow pilot described to me. They're typically crop dusters, designed for low speed flight (like gliders) and with very powerful engines. They're not particularly pretty to look at, but they get the job done. We slowly circled up into the sky, gaining altitude until we'd reached the cloud deck, at which point the glider pilot (sitting behind me) pulled the release on the tow cable and we were free.
Gliding is all about energy management. Mostly that means trying to maintain altitude (potential energy), but if you want you can go into a dive and get up to a high speed (kinetic energy). Mostly though you quietly sail around, looking for updrafts of air (thermals) that will give you a free boost in altitude and thus extend your flight.
It actually wasn't as quiet as I expected. These are, by necessity, extremely aerodynamic aircraft, but there is still quite a bit of wind noise. I'm sure, though, that it's far less than the unholy racket you are subjected to in a small motorized aircraft like a Piper Cub or a Cessna.
The view is, of course, right there. In four directions (forward, up, left and right) you have only the clear glass canopy separating you from outside. In fact, I had a better view than the pilot, whose view forward was blocked by my big fat head. The aforementioned skydivers actually appeared in front of us (still far away) at one point and we had to steer away from them. Having to worry about decapitating some hotdogging frat boy was detracting from my flight, bastards!
Back to the thermals ... Once we found one, we would go into a tight left or right turn, spiraling slowly to stay inside that invisible column of rising air. Glider pilots learn to look for certain things that indicate a likely thermal updraft: birds soaring in circles, large warehouses with their expanses of hot roof, cumulus clouds popping up. We'd spiral up, watching the gauge that told us if we were indeed still climbing (you can't otherwise tell, really), and once we started dropping again we'd pull out of the turn and head off straight for something else.
Apparently you can stay up forever this way, riding thermals indefinitely, until you run out of daylight. My ride was supposed to be only 30 minutes, but I guess that's just a minimum that they promise you in case they don't find any thermals, because we were up for nearly an hour. No, wait, I just checked the time stamps on the camera and I was up for 38 minutes!
I thought it was quite a bit longer than that ... I guess because after spiraling up the third or fourth thermal, my stomach was starting to get a little weary of it. Fortunately I didn't commit the ultimate act of embarrassment, but I was glad to get back down on the ground.
The pilot let me fly the glider a LOT, as much as I wanted, and I was really focused on trying to keep the aircraft under control, so much so that I didn't look around as much as I would have liked to. But I think there will definitely be a "next time"!
UPDATE: I forgot to mention, I do have videos! I'm just not a Youtube-postin' kind of guy, so if you want to see them, you have to come over to our house and see them on our TV! However this video posted on Youtube (opens in new window) by some other guy was done at the exact same airfield in the same aircraft, so you get to see what it's like.