Glider flying, especially long-distance cross-country glider flying, is unlike any other form of aviation. Instead of a takeoff followed by hours of boring holes through the sky in a straight line, a cross-country glider flight is a minute-by-minute, second-by-second adrenaline junkie’s dream. With no engine, it is the pilot’s skill, ingenuity, and daring that powers the glider through the sky in an intimate dance with Mother Nature. Learning to fly a glider is much simpler than learning to fly powered aircraft (minimum age for gliders is 14 for solo, 16 for private license), and is a great way to transition into powered flying. On the other hand, learning to fly a glider well enough to go hundreds of miles without an engine is a great way to sharpen basic flying skills that may not get exercised very well in powered flying.
In the Beginning
Before the Wright Brothers first severed humanity’s bonds to Mother Earth in 1903, all the aerodynamics for that first powered flight had been worked out beforehand during three years of experimental glider flights. At the beginning of each year’s testing program at Kitty Hawk, they first had to assemble their machines from parts made in their bicycle shop—making them among the first-ever kit-built aircraft.
Since that first powered flight, most of the world’s attention, energy, and time have gone into ever better, faster, and more efficient powered aircraft. People forget that, for the most part, it all started with gliders. However, a small parallel culture of plans-built and kit-built gliders persisted, culminating in the highly evolved and efficient racing machines we have today. Glider design and evolution got a big boost in the 1920s and 30s, when German pilots were forbidden by the WW-I armistice treaty from building or flying powered aircraft. As a way of circumventing the restrictions, Germany concentrated on gliding and gliders to the extent that almost all modern racing gliders are now designed and manufactured in Germany.
Cross-country soaring is a game of finding thermals to lift the sailplane high enough to set out in search of another thermal. This is repeated as many times as necessary to complete a course or reach a goal.
Comparing a modern racing glider to a typical general-aviation four-place plane is like comparing a Ford F-150 to a sleek Jaguar XKE sports car—they both get the job done, but it is clear that the F-150 is mostly for work and the XKE is mostly for play. Modern gliders—or, more formally, sailplanes—stay aloft by exploiting natural rising air columns or thermals in much the same way as hawks, eagles, and other soaring birds. If the air in the thermal goes high enough, the entrained moisture condenses and forms a visible cumulus fair-weather cloud, marking the thermal for knowledgeable glider pilots. On a good day with lots of white puffy cumulus clouds, It is not unusual at all for an expert glider pilot to take off (gliders are typically towed up to about 2000 feet agl by a towplane) at mid-day and not return until nearly dark, covering hundreds of miles without landing in the process. Modern gliders have glide ratios in the 40s and 50s, meaning that from 5000 feet agl, they can glide 40 to 50 miles between thermals. By contrast, a typical powered plane’s glide ratio is more like 10:1.
Two top racing pilots sharing the same thermal.
Competition Sharpens the Species
As glider technology and pilot skill improved over the last three or four decades, competitions naturally evolved to determine the best pilot with the best glider. Initially these competitions were focused on who could stay aloft the longest, but that quickly became impractical as glider technology allowed almost anyone to stay aloft all day and into the evening hours. Then the focus shifted to who could cover the most distance in a day, and even that became impractical as pilots started landing so far away that they couldn’t make it back to the contest site in time for the next day’s race. Now in modern races, the focus is on who can go around a prescribed course (typically triangular with the start and finish at the same airport) in the shortest time, i.e. with the highest average speed. In good weather it isn’t unusual at all for the winning average speed to be 60 or even 70 mph, and some western desert sites, with lots of sun and huge thermals, can support average speeds over 100 mph! A 100 mph average speed means the pilot has to fly significantly faster than 100 mph between thermals, in order to make up for the time lost gaining altitude in thermals where the glider is essentially stationary.
At a typical regional soaring contest, 30–60 pilots congregate at a soaring center (gliderport in the vernacular) or public airport for a week-long competition. Each day, pilots remove their gliders from custom-built trailers and assemble them, a process that takes about 30–60 minutes depending on the glider type and the pilot’s experience. (Experts have been known to cut this to 10 minutes.) Then the gliders are moved out on the runway and staged for takeoff in a grid, where each pilot has a specific spot that is rotated each day, so no one pilot is always first or last in the launch sequence. When the sun has been up long enough to generate sufficient thermal activity, all gliders are launched in sequence using older generation modified crop-dusters like the venerable Piper Pawnee. After all gliders are aloft, the contest director starts the race with a radio call, and gliders stream out on course, attempting to exploit available lift sources as efficiently and quickly as possible. After flying the day’s task of several hundred miles in 3–5 hours, gliders start streaming across the finish line in the late afternoon and evening. After dinner and beer, complete with lots of stories, the gliders are disassembled and put back in their trailers to await the next day’s adventures. A few unlucky (or unskilled) pilots who don’t make it around the course might find themselves in a farmer’s field or at another airport. Outlandings, as they are called, are an integral and unavoidable part of cross-country soaring; if you fly cross-country long enough, you will find yourself in a farmer’s field at one point or another. When this happens, the pilot calls back to the home airport with location information and someone brings the trailer out to the field where the glider is disassembled and returned in time to be ready the next day. I have had the dubious pleasure of talking to farmers all over the country at one time or another, and it is almost always a pleasurable experience, once you get past the embarrassment of being on the ground instead of up in the air.
The beautiful lines of a modern racing glider.
Competitions and record attempts in the U.S. are regulated and sanctioned by the Soaring Society of America (www.ssa.org), and international gliding activities come under the purview of the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the same organization that governs all aviation-related matters. The FAI delegates most international gliding record and competition matters to the International Gliding Committee, the IGC. International gliding championships are extremely popular events in Europe and the rest of the world, often drawing hundreds of the top soaring pilots from all over the world. The top European racers are national celebrities, but the sport is much less well known in the U.S. In fact, the U.S. just hosted a World Gliding Championship this last summer in Uvalde, Texas (a very small town, but well known all over the world for its superb soaring conditions). The WGC was hugely popular in Europe, but garnered almost no media coverage outside some local Texas outlets.
For the Fun of It
Soaring is both a relaxing and exciting form of aviation and, with a multitude of kits and plans for both gliders and motorgliders available, one in which committed homebuilders can easily get involved. It is an alternative to the Light Sport category for those who don’t want to maintain an FAA medical, and motorgliders provide a surprisingly efficient way to fly. Learning to soar will make anyone a better pilot (just as learning any new skill keeps the mind and body sharp) and nothing beats the experience of sailing through the air with the same sense as a bird—nibbling for lift and enjoying the pure sensation of flight.
Where to learn more
For more information about gliding in general and where to fly in your area, see the Soaring Society of America’s web site at www.ssa.org. For additional information about the Condor Soaring Simulator, see www.condorsoaring.com. For a short but exciting look at a real-life cross-country glider competition, see Sean Fidler’s video taken at a regional championship held near Gettysburg, PA (http://vimeo.com/52396659).
While most potential builders that are looking for a project are thinking powered airplane or rotorcraft, the number of kits available to build sailplanes and motorgliders might surprise them. A quick search through the Kitplanes® Buyer’s Guide database uncovered 13 different kits to produce a full spectrum of aircraft that can satisfy the beginner or expert. Most require the same skills as a typical homebuilt airplane kit, although they are all heavy on the composite side of the spectrum. Gliders are great for both young and old alike—a good place to get a start in aviation, or a wonderful way to keep flying when the medical process becomes too much of a burden.
—P.D.
While there are a fortunate few soaring pilots who live in places where winter glider flying is possible, most of us put our gliders away in October or November, and don’t get them back out again until April or May. During the winter downtime, we mostly tell lies to one another and gripe about how long it’s been since our last flight and how long it’s going to be before we can fly again. There were a few soaring flight simulators around, and the popular MS Flight Simulator had rudimentary glider capability, but nothing that came anywhere close to providing the heart-thumping adrenaline rush from flying a super-responsive racing machine for hundreds of miles with no engine. However, in 2005 that all changed with the release of the Condor Soaring Simulator program for PCs. (Sorry, it doesn’t run on Apple, except via BootCamp or Parallels.)
The Condor Soaring Simulator being used for one-on-one instruction. Note the visible thermals.
Interactive Competition
The Condor soaring simulation software was written by Uroš Bergant and Gregor Rozman, both aviation and soaring enthusiasts from Slovenia. Uroš started the effort in 2000 as a way of combining a background in physics, a love of soaring, and a knack for graphics programming, and Gregor joined the effort in 2002. Condor was first released to the public in late 2005 with just one scenery (the authors’ native Slovenia), and a half-dozen or so glider types. Since then, it has gone through 15 significant revisions (called patches in the Condor world), and now sports all the top glider types and user-contributed sceneries for every popular soaring site in the world (and some that are literally out of this world). Condor was designed and implemented from the ground up as an online multi-player racing platform. Pilots join a race by logging on to a server, and nearby (in the sim) gliders are depicted accurately in the field of view. The pilots can be anywhere on the planet, but will all appear to be in the same airspace, and the action is completely synchronized so everything happens in real time. A three-hour race in Condor takes three hours in real time, so make sure to go to the bathroom first. (There is a rudimentary autopilot for those of us with short-range tanks.) A particular race can handle up to 32 pilots, but more can be accommodated by programming multiple servers to offer the exact same race at the same time. After all the races are over, the scores are combined to produce overall results. It is not at all unusual for a big European competition to have several hundred competitors flying at the same time, and competition for the top spot is fierce.
The instructor flying behind the student in Condor to provide feedback on thermalling technique.
When the Condor simulator was first released, there was the usual naysaying from older soaring pilots who thought of Condor as just another PC game for kids, with no applicability to the real world of soaring at all. Ironically, many of these same pilots were professional airline and corporate pilots who used flight simulators regularly for initial and recurrent proficiency training. Somehow it didn’t seem plausible to them that a $50 PC online game program could have any valid training effect, compared to the million-dollar full-motion flight simulators they were familiar with. As it turns out though, the Condor simulator is more than good enough to produce the same sort of mental and physical challenges that a real-life soaring pilot experiences, and some of us have started to use Condor for serious training. Scott Manley, a retired educator and lifelong student of instruction theory and techniques, has begun using Condor for ab initio instruction with excellent results. He now has had a number of students go through his program and then go on to get their real-world glider tickets, uniformly amazing their real-life instructors with their preparation and skill levels. The author uses Condor extensively for off-season race training, and also uses it to provide online advanced race training for other pilots. Just this last season, we saw undeniable evidence of just how good the Condor simulator can be in preparing pilots for real-life cross-country glider racing. Two different pilots who were new to soaring (one was a 17-year-old brand-new pilot and the other was a middle-aged software engineer with power experience) decided to try their hand at their first real-world soaring competition, after extensive preparation using Condor. Both pilots easily won their respective classes in a dramatic demonstration of simulator training effectiveness.
Condor scenery is patterned after real-world areas and is very realistic.
Fly for Fun, Fly for Skill
Condor is great for fun flying, serious personal training, and instruction. For pilots new to gliding and cross-country soaring, Condor has a number of features that aren’t found in real life, like the ability to make thermals visible, a miracle feature that provides an instant 3000-foot altitude boost, and the ability to move the point of view from out of the cockpit to a nearby glider—all features great for the beginner and instructor alike.
Both real-life and Condor soaring experiences offer a lot to the power pilot looking to brush up on their stick-and-rudder skills in a fun and exhilarating way, while simultaneously achieving a much more intimate understanding of the bountiful energy that has been harnessed for eons by hawks, eagles, and much more recently by sleek racing gliders.
—F.P.
