When you’re banking to the left, searching for the next bit of lift, it is truly possible to forget the horrors of the world below you and just live in the moment, writes Barry Rueger.CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/Getty Images
Barry Rueger is a Canadian writer based in Cambridge.
The parachute on my back – tightened up so that it was properly uncomfortable – turned out to also be my back seat cushion in my Schleicher ASK 21 glider. After two flights I’d learned how to climb in by first perching on the side of the cockpit, then swinging one leg, then the other, into the nose of the plane, before carefully lowering myself around the joystick at the front of what passed for a seat. Shifting forward, I adjusted the rudder pedals down at my feet, and then wiggled down a bit further so that my head would be just below the clear canopy that would be lowered down and locked in.
On my third flight of the day I changed instructors. I had just fastened my seatbelt straps – over my shoulders, around my waist, between my legs – when my new instructor, Martin Whitehead, asked me, “Did you do any aerobatics today?”
When I said no, just regular flights with some gentle turns, he asked, “Do you want to?”
I jumped at the opportunity with an excited, “Yes!”
“I have control,” he said. “Hang on.”
When you’re flying an unpowered two-seat glider you have no engine to provide thrust, so if you have to build up airspeed, and lift, you do that by using gravity to accelerate your pace. Before I had a chance to understand what was happening, we were diving straight down toward the ground to pick up speed.
Then, just when it felt we were going to crash, Martin pulled back on his stick, and suddenly we were going straight up instead. Then the ground was over my head, then the horizon, then we levelled off. Where my stomach was is another question. I’ve been assured that in time my body will learn to handle this with no problem.
It was one of the most amazing moments of my life, even if I couldn’t manage a grin.
First Person: No longer a flight attendant, I found a place to come back down to Earth
During the Second World War, the Gransden Lodge Airfield was home to the No. 405 Squadron, the only Canadian squadron in the Royal Air Force’s elite Pathfinder force, first flying Halifax bombers, and then Canadian-built Lancasters. Now the field is home to the Cambridge Gliding Club. The club is a group effort – a community really – and affiliated with the Cambridge University Student Gliding Club. This well-oiled, mostly volunteer operation, has one goal: to get people like me into the air.
Just launching a glider takes a team: the glider pilot; possibly a passenger like me learning to fly; a third person to run alongside the plane, supporting the end of one of the eight-meter-long wings until it has lift – otherwise it might drop and catch on the ground; and finally another pilot operating a tow plane, or someone at the ground-based winch. The goal is simple: hooked at the end of a long, long rope is the glider. The Robin DR400-180R tow plane pulls the sailplane behind it, climbing up into the sky. Once it reaches the right altitude – it was 3,000 feet on this day – the line is released, then drops away, and the glider relies on only the air, the wind, and the skill of the pilot to keep flying.
Experienced pilots can locate the places where thermals will be found: rising columns of air that will lift the plane to higher altitudes and extend the flight. You quickly learn to read the clouds above you, gauging the potential for rising air. Cross-country flyers can travel for hours, rising and falling like soaring birds, collecting altitude and speed where they can.
For beginners like me the goal is simpler: keep the wings level, the nose pointed at the horizon, and manage some gentle left- and right-hand turns. My right hand was on the joystick between my legs. If I pulled it towards me the nose rose, slowing the plane. If I pushed it away the nose dropped, and we gained speed. Tipping the stick to the left or the right swung the plane in the same direction.
In front of me my feet were on the rudder pedals. I was learning how to use these three sets of controls to direct my flight, and learning that in a glider those controls are delicate and need focus. Just a tiny shift of my hand sent the nose to the left, and we were suddenly diving. Pulling up oh so gently smoothed out the turn, bringing us level.
When I was learning how to canoe, I learned that you can’t force a canoe to do what you need: you have to feel the water around it, and the wind, and the way that your paddle is connecting with the currents when you pull back in a J-stroke. To enjoy canoeing, and to do it comfortably, you need to understand the elements around you and work with them, not against them.
Gliding is the same. As the day progressed I could feel the air change temperature, and direction, and even personality. The skies that had been smooth and comfortable in the morning became bumpy and frightening – at least for a beginner. I learned to handle the controls gently, and carefully, not to toss them around without thought. I learned to spot landmarks to orient myself, and to spot the airfield where we would need to land. And I learned to be conscious of the ground below, watching the postcard English fields and twisting roads; the sheep, and the waterways.
The people that I met flying were as fascinating as the flying itself. University of Cambridge students took turns with commercial jet pilots that were looking for an opportunity to do some “real flying.” One learned that the ground comes up much faster in a glider than it does in an Airbus, blowing a tire when he landed – and then he helped to replace it. The annual “Women Go Flying” day has built a community of young women who had joined the club, and we had a 90-year-old former nun fly with us one evening. She even did a loop-the-loop.
As to why we all do it? I think that almost anyone who has travelled by air has wished they could be in the pilot’s seat. What we all share is the sense that we’re doing something truly magic. Once the cable has been released there are only two things keeping us in the air: the currents around us, and our skill at navigating them. The first time that you turn into a thermal, and feel the glider rising higher and higher, you’re experiencing something that simply can’t happen on the ground. And especially that when you’re banking to the left, searching for the next bit of lift, it is truly possible to forget the horrors of the world below you and just live in the moment.