Gliding E-Book

Steve Longland

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 314

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 2001 by The Crowood Press Ltd, Ramsbury, Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

Revised edition 2012

This e-book edition first published in 2012

© Stephen Longland 2001 and 2012

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 978 1 84797 444 0

Acknowledgements

A number of the illustrations in this book have appeared previously in Sailplane and Gliding (UK gliding’s official magazine), and/or in training material provided by the BGA. They were drawn by the author of this book, who is grateful to both of the above for allowing him to ‘replay’ them here and so save himself a lot of time. My thanks again to the beta-readers, Penny in particular, for ploughing through the chaff of earlier drafts in search of wheat, and to all of them for those interesting suggestions which were possible! Many thanks also to the very generous people who have allowed me to use their excellent photographs without charge. Special thanks to my brother Simon, who created a 3D model of an ASK21, which has been used as the basis for many of the illustrations.

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

1 The Early Days

2 The Modern Gliding Club

3 How Gliders Work

4 Methods of Launch

5 What’s in the Cockpit?

6 Gliding Basics

7 The Instruction

8 Preparation for Flight

9 The Flight Exercises

10 Lift

11 Glider Performance

12 Cross Country Flying

13 Owning Your Own Glider

14 Competitive Flying

Useful Contacts

Bibliography

Index

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, such a trial of a flight has provided opportunities for self-improvement and keeping in practice, has advanced one’s understanding of the atmosphere and how it behaves, and increased one’s appreciation of the glider’s delightful handling qualities – and no doubt done many other equally elevating things. But enough is enough, and now, with a clear conscience of duty done, landing can be made.

Such ‘improving’ days are relatively rare, but while one might complain about them, nothing can be done – this is the weather, after all – and from a pilot’s point of view there is always something to be gained from flying in less than optimum conditions. Exactly what, though, can sometimes be debatable.

1 The Early Days

Although balloons had taken to the air by 1786, and blown away in the wind much as they have done ever since, it took nearly seventy years before steerable and navigable balloons, known as dirigibles, became a reality. And it was more than fifty years after that before true powered, heavier-than-air flight was achieved.

The road to heavier-than-air flight was not to be an easy one. First, there was the complete lack of a relatively light and powerful engine. That did not arrive until Nickolaus Otto invented the internal (petrol) combustion engine in 1876. Second, almost all of the extensive body of aerodynamic and structural knowledge that is fundamental to successful heavier-than-air flight simply didn’t exist. Thirdly, very few people had the time, money or the inclination to devote themselves to solving any of these problems.

Sporadic attempts at flight had taken place throughout recorded history. The myth of Daedalus and Icarus may have some basis in fact, but it is more of a finger-wagging moral tale than a technical description of structural meltdown. Most of the attempts at flight before 1800, and about which we know, were characterized by the often fatal triumph of faith over intelligence. One cannot deny the foolhardy courage of some of the earliest attempts, but essential to success is imagination and practicality, plus a generous splash of unemotional common sense. One of the first people to be interested in heavier-than-air flight and to have all these qualities in anything like safe proportions, plus the analytical brain to go with them, was the Yorkshire baronet Sir George Cayley.

Sir George, who was born in 1773 and died of old age in 1857, was the first person to outline exactly what was required for flight, and to have some practical and positive results in that area. Most of his predecessors had attempted, with a complete lack of success, to imitate the birds. Jump from a high place, flap furiously and hope for the best was about as far as most of them went – and in a downward direction.

Cayley knew that these types of antics relied far too much on luck, and that a more cautious and thought-out approach would have more success. He also knew that we weren’t strong enough to fly by flapping. However, he did not, as he could have done (and no doubt been applauded for his good sense), give up on heavier-than-air flight. He realized that regardless of what the birds were doing, we did not have to flap to fly; all we had to do was utilize the same basic principles as the bird itself was using. In other words, we could have a fixed wing for ‘lift’, add an engine to create the necessary forward movement, and treat the two as separate items.

Air may surround and keep us alive but it is (a) invisible and (b), by comparison with water, apparently incapable of supporting anything heavier than a cloud or a balloon. Without belittling the major advance that balloons represented, lighter-than-air flight was relatively straightforward. People knew that objects could be made to float in water, and there was no reason to suppose that a machine couldn’t be made that floated in the air, thin though it was. Heavier-than-air flight was something else altogether. Air’s invisibility was bad enough, but worse, much of the traditional theory behind how things worked was based upon the words of long dead Greek philosophers, and was just plain wrong. There’s no guarantee that what we know today is correct but most theories appear to fit the reality better now, and if they don’t they are replaced.

Cayley’s 1804 model glider.

Cayley built several gliders, beginning in 1804 with a model which bears a striking resemblance to contemporary chuck-gliders, and a small biplane glider that is alleged to have carried a ten-year-old boy. His aeronautical researches and writings continued in fits and starts throughout his long and immensely busy life, and in 1852, when he was seventy, he built a man-carrying glider in which he persuaded his coachman, John Appleby, to fly. The glider was launched from one side of a small valley in Yorkshire by several strong men, flew swiftly and smoothly to the other side and crashed. Appleby, unhurt, told Sir George that he had been hired to drive, not fly, and resigned on the spot. In terms of further advances in practical aviation that was just about it for many years.

When suitable engines were not available the only research vehicles, whether models or not, had to be gliders. The original aim was always powered flight, and gliding just one step along the way to what was regarded as the more serious goal. Gliding was just a bit – well, rather childish! This view of gliding as toy aviation is unfortunately still fairly common, even among people who ought to know better, and as witless now as it was then. Had suitable engines been around, things would undoubtedly have been different, but for many of the pioneers that fact probably saved their lives.

The press and public attitude to heavier-than-air flight, when it existed at all, was almost entirely negative. What attracted attention, then as now, was the toying with danger – just as long as the watchers themselves weren’t likely to be involved in the results. Huge crowds attended both balloon launchings and public executions – the distinction between the two being sometimes a bit vague. But if fireworks and death captured public attention, what had aeroplanes to offer? Absolutely nothing because, in the general view, nobody had ever made one that worked. Might as well try and fly the washerwoman’s wicker laundry basket! Yet, even though a powered aircraft hadn’t flown, and wouldn’t do so until 1903, Cayley’s gliders had already done so, though the flights were all short.

He was well aware of what would today be classed as an image problem. Replying to a correspondent in 1809, he wrote in mild exasperation (he was too even-handed a man to become incandescent), of ‘the art of flying, or aerial navigation, as I have chosen to term it for the sake of giving a little more dignity to a subject bordering upon the ludicrous in public estimation’.

All of the most successful early experimenters, including Otto Lilienthal (1848–96), understood the value of models and testing. Lilienthal had none of today’s sophisticated equipment but, like Cayley before him, he knew that flight was an area where guesswork could easily prove fatal. Lilienthal made many flights in his various gliders, which he controlled by shifting his weight, like a modern hang glider pilot. Of all his many contributions to heavier-than–air flight, one of the more important, if inadvertent, was to be the first person to be photographed ‘aviating’ successfully. The resultant publicity had an almost wholly positive effect, and proved to a previously thoroughly unimpressed public that aeroplanes might very well work, exactly as the madmen had been saying all along.

Nevertheless, despite changes in public attitudes, and the new enthusiasm generated among other researchers, success remained frustratingly elusive. The Boys Book of Aeroplanes of 1912 summed up the six-year period between Lilienthal’s unfortunate death in a crash and the Wright brothers’ eventual success, as follows:

At this stage in the history of aviation the student finds himself in the midst of considerable confusion. Ideas old, worn out, fantastic or ludicrous are mingled with a mass of good experimental and theoretical work that is stultified by want of money and by want of motive power. Thus, because there was no means of ascertaining the real value of any theory, the work was done over and over again and continued in periodical resurrection until early in the twentieth century…

A few names stand out in that period. Among them was the Frenchman Alphonse Penaud (1850–80) whose suicide at the age of thirty, from a mixture of ill-health and despair, removed from the scene one of the most brilliant and original experimenters of the time. The Englishman, Percy Pilcher, was continuing Lilienthal’s experiments and on the verge of adding a carbonic acid motor to what was, in fact, a hang glider, when he was killed in a flying accident.

Then came the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Oddly, most of the aerial experimenters before them – with the exception of Cayley and the others already mentioned – were utterly obsessed with making an aeroplane that was so well behaved in the air that it didn’t, in effect, need a pilot at all. To these people the notion of any form of control was entirely foreign. Had any of their machines become airborne, the pilot’s influence on the subsequent course of the flight would have been zero. There are occasions when, with hindsight, it is clear that everything would have turned out a great deal better if the pilot hadn’t been allowed any say at all. But we would all agree that if we buy a new car, for example, it is very nice if it comes with a steering wheel that works.

Distance of Wright brothers’ first powered flight.

The Wrights decided from the outset that they needed a controllable aeroplane, and then made things very difficult for themselves by choosing one of the most unstable configurations possible, tail-first. That aside, a large part of their success was due to their meticulous research and testing. They knew also that piloting skills were vital. Weight shift did not seem to them to be an ideal method of control and over several years they researched and developed a system broadly similar to that used by today’s aircraft, but it was definitely the hard knocks ‘crash-bang-try-it-again’ school of ‘how to be a pilot’. Luckily these days, learning to fly isn’t quite so DIY, but had the Wrights not learnt skilful control of their gliders, their very first powered flight would almost certainly have been a disaster.

On a windy day in December 1903, Orville made the first controlled powered heavier-than-air flight in the world. It lasted all of 12 secs and covered about 120ft – rather less than the wingspan of a Boeing 747. Had there been no wind the flight would have been about 550ft (shorter than Lilienthal’s longest glides). Subsequent flights on the same day were longer, with the final one lasting 59 secs and covering a distance over the ground of about half a mile. Their ‘Flyer’ sustained minor damage during the last landing, and shortly after it was returned to their base camp on the dunes for repairs, it was blown over by a gust of wind and seriously damaged.

SPORTING GLIDING

Parting of the ways?

Despite its idealism, the dream of flight was, like most human dreams, never entirely innocent. To fly freely like the birds, without a care in the world etc, was the main intent, yet it always had about it a strong whiff of the commercial. The idea of travelling quickly to any part of the globe, there to trade and then return, preferably with profit, was a powerful one that has not changed over the years. Neither has ‘quickly’ changed much. It remains the relative word it has always been. Even in the year 2012 it takes nearly 24 hours of commercially sponsored discomfort, trapped in the aerial equivalent of a mediaeval torture chamber and mobile petri dish, to reach Australia or New Zealand. Aircraft can now go just about anywhere in almost any kind of weather, and are even starting to look after themselves. Bit by bit, engineers are turning professional pilots into aerial couch potatoes. By comparison, sporting aviation, gliding in particular, is hands-on flying and the pilot is responsible for just about everything that happens.

The appeal of motorless flight is quite difficult to describe. It is partly a game of energy management that requires skill for success, but there is also a sufficient element of luck and the unexpected to keep your attention and jazz up what could otherwise become either routine or, if your skill was never quite sufficient, rather depressing.

There is also the feeling, as there must have been in all aviation in the early days, of contact with the living and invisible body of the air, and there is a very tactile relationship between it and the pilot and glider. There are the panoramic views, the light of the sun on the clouds, the wonderfully varied quilt of field and shadow, and the endlessly subtle variations in colour. The world appears very tidy and trouble free from up above, wrapped all about by the thin, almost threadbare protective coat of an atmosphere randomly patterned by the weather: constantly changing, independent, full of surprises, and the unreliable provider of the fuel that gliders need to stay airborne.

Zogling primary glider.

There were, and probably always will be, people who like the idea of making use of some of the essentially free energy available in the air, and who appreciate also the blend of intellectual and physical skills required to make the best out of what is available. Yet a common factor relating to all the motorless airsports, and probably very much in the minds of the earliest exponents of sporting gliding, remains cost. Powered flight can be very expensive. Gliding clubs were set up by enthusiasts to reduce their individual costs, and they operated like friendly societies owning several gliders which individual members, in effect, rented out.

The first gliding clubs in the UK were set up after the First World War, following several gliding ‘meets’ that attracted large numbers of spectators. By 1930 there were about fifty gliding clubs dotted around the UK, and known to be operational by the British Gliding Association, itself founded in 1929 to promote the sport of gliding.

Changing shapes of gliders.

EVOLUTION

It was inevitable that demands for better performance, largely based on the desire for longer flights, would fuel technical advance, and between the twentieth century’s two World Wars the sporting glider gradually evolved from a basic flying machine into something elegant, light, and extremely efficient. New forms of lifting air were discovered and flight distances went from a few miles, to fifty, then a hundred, then to three hundred. The challenge to do just a bit better each time and discover something new, was one which always was and hopefully always will be irresistible. Ironically, one of the bigger boosts to the gliding movement came as a result of the First World War. At the cessation of hostilities in 1918, the Treaty of Versailles forbade the Germans an air force, but in the 1930s the fledgling and secret Luftwaffe sidestepped this restriction by using the gliding clubs to train its pilots.

By the late 1930s there was talk of gliding becoming an Olympic sport. Indeed, the decision was taken to introduce it during the event scheduled for 1940. To give every competitor a level playing field, ie to measure pilot ability rather than glider performance, the Meise, designed and built in Germany, was chosen to be the first of what it was assumed would be an Olympic breed. Darker and less happy things were in the wind, unfortunately, and the Second World War put a stop to all that. Gliding still isn’t an Olympic event, probably because it is neither a spectator sport, nor particularly ‘instant’ like football or athletics. Even so, modern developments in electronics (on-board cameras and the like) could change all that, and there have already been Internet based ‘from the front’ reports of gliding competitions.

Comparative sizes.

MILITARY USESOF GLIDERS

Gliding in wartime

During the war, sporting gliding was obviously put on hold, but gliders were built in vast numbers to carry troops and ordnance. The Germans had originally pioneered their military use, and during D-Day the Allies used gliders in vast numbers. Some of the film footage from the period, with landing areas littered with scores of shattered gliders, would make any modern club’s Chief Flying Instructor (not to mention the Treasurer) weep. As for the troops who had to go into battle in these disposable machines, they probably looked upon their flights as toboggan rides to hell.

For the intended invasion of Britain in 1940, the Germans had built one of the largest gliders ever seen, the Me323 Gigant. This monster had a span of 180ft (55m) – 16ft less than a standard 747 – and a maximum take-off weight of 94,799lb (43,000kg). Towing it was a risky business. Eventually the scale and danger of the whole exercise proved too much, and the Gigant was fitted with six engines of its own and left to look after itself. Although completely irrelevant to sporting gliding, the Gigant does nevertheless represent one of the extremes to which gliders have been taken.

An ASH-25 two-seat glider over the Barres des Ecrins in the southern French alps. J. BRIDGE

Gargantuanism has afflicted sporting gliding at various other times, and in 1930 one of the largest soaring gliders ever built was a one-off called the Austria, which had a span of 98ft (30m). Modern gliders like the ASH25 or the Nimbus 4 have a span of 25m. The latest and largest sporting glider ever, the ETA, first flew at Magdeburg in Germany, on 3 July 2000; its span is 99ft 8in (30.4m).

At the other end of the scale are very small gliders like the Hutter 17, with a span of 32ft (9.69m), the first example of which was built in 1934. The photograph on the next page will give you a clearer idea of its scale – the person in the picture is 5ft 4in.

POST WORLD WAR TWO GLIDINGIN THE UK

By the end of the Second World War Europe had been devastated and the UK was technically bankrupt. Hard and depressing times lay ahead, and in the UK rationing and shortages of one sort or another remained facts of life until the early 1950s. Nevertheless, pre-war sporting gliders both in Britain and abroad, which had mysteriously vanished at the outset of hostilities, began to reappear. As the UK’s economy improved, and things began to look brighter, interest in air sports in general revived. Pre-war clubs dragged themselves to their feet again and new ones appeared, helped by the energy and enthusiasm of pre-war glider pilots.

Surprisingly, gliding had its most remarkable renaissance in Germany, a country that lay in ruins and was broken in two. Out of the wreckage there gradually emerged a strong gliding movement and what were to become some of the best known designers and glider manufacturers in the world. In the tradition of Lilienthal, there were and are aeronautical research facilities attached to some German universities which design and build one-off sailplanes (such as the ETA mentioned earlier) as student projects and/or as part of general aerodynamic research. The UK did have a flourishing glider industry of its own until 1972, when the last surviving UK builder of gliders, Slingsby Sailplanes, dropped out of the picture. Today, Germany is the only country in the world which designs, produces and exports gliders in any appreciable volume.

As for the future, there are still records to break and advances to be made. Technical excellence has increased glider performance beyond anything anyone ever thought possible, but it has come at a high price. There are signs that the co-operative element, which was such a strong feature of the early clubs, is being eroded by increasing private ownership – which in itself is partly a response to the increased pressures on people’s time. In both respects the smaller clubs tend to be less affected. As a result gliding faces new challenges, but the original impetus of the sport, its soul if you like, remains untouched. The challenge and beauty are as matchless as they have always been, and it can still teach self reliance and co-operation in equal and balanced measure.

A Hutter 17, first built in 1934.

2 The Modern Gliding Club

THE BGA AND EUROPE

The function of the UK’s CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) was to ensure that aviation in this country was both safe and legal, two requirements which are not always the same thing. As part of European Integration, the CAA will continue to attempt to perform the perfect balancing act between the letter of the law and common sense, but now as a ‘competent authority’ under the European Air Safety Agency (EASA), who will be creating the regulations and who answer only to the European parliament. A predictable result has been additional layers of ‘administration’, and the dreary inevitability with which prices have increased and paperwork has proliferated. Although EASA has the final say in all matters aeronautical, the British Gliding Association (BGA), via the CAA, remains responsible for the conduct and practices of gliding in the UK. The CAA will continue to enjoy many of its previous powers, which have included the ability to bring any aviation activity to a complete standstill if they deem it necessary, and the authority to treat regulatory noncompliance as a criminal offence.

It is rather unfortunate that the aviation branch with the highest public profile, though not the most central by any means, is the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB). This is largely because aviation accidents can infrequently involve headline-grabbing numbers of deaths. Sadly, the real shock horror which we tolerate with misplaced equanimity as just another of those ‘unavoidable things’, is car accidents, which kill far more of us in smaller, less dramatic but far more frequent accidents.

The clubs’ relationship to the BGA

The BGA itself is not a governing body as such, but a coordinator of gliding activities and standards in this country, and the members of its main committee are voted in by the member clubs.

Gliding club organisation

Gliding clubs vary widely in what they are able to provide the budding pilot – not necessarily in terms of instruction, but in the facilities that they offer and the numbers of days on which they operate. Because gliding is almost entirely run by people who actively participate in the sport, at whatever level, it is controlled largely by enthusiasts, the overwhelming majority of whom provide their services for free. The drawback of this situation is that not everyone has time free when it suits the club, so the number of club members can be the determining factor in a few key areas. For example, some of the smaller clubs only operate at weekends, or at weekends and maybe on one or two other days during the week. The larger, commercially run clubs, on the other hand, are invariably seven day a week operations, usually but not always throughout the year.

EASA, CAA and BGA.

Typical club structure.

Ground facilities can vary hugely, but don’t judge the worth of a club from that. In terms of broadening your gliding experience, some of the most interesting and instructive sites from which to fly don’t have bunkhouses, restaurant facilities or enormously plush clubhouses and well stocked bars. They probably all have toilets. The composition of club-owned fleets can also vary and be anything from all old to all new. As far as learning to glide is concerned such differences are largely cosmetic, but the fleet’s composition can influence the costs, with more modern fleets being more expensive. The majority of the clubs that offer to train you will have at least two dual-seat training gliders, plus several club owned single-seat gliders to which you will convert when you go solo.

Once you have passed beyond the very early ab initio (under instruction) stage, and particularly once you are solo, most clubs will expect you to help out in some way. Depending on your experience and how the club is organised, you might be asked to help out at the launch point in some capacity, or train to be a winch driver, a cable retrieve truck driver or to do some other necessary job suited better to your particular skills. No gliding club can function without someone doing these often mundane jobs.