Fifty-two minutes over the quarry
Every gliding site has its house thermal, a place where warm air rises more reliably than anywhere else nearby, and ours is the limestone quarry about two kilometres east of the field. On a sunny day the pale rock heats up faster than the woods and fields around it, and the warm air goes up in a column that is sometimes marked at the top by a small cumulus cloud. The older pilots fly to it straight after the launch without even looking.
Yesterday I did the same, for the first time on my own. I released at 420 metres, turned east and flew towards the quarry, watching the variometer, the instrument that shows whether you are climbing or sinking, with a tone that rises as the air rises. Halfway there it went quiet, then started beeping, and the glider lifted one wing as if someone had pushed it from below. That lifting wing is the sign: you turn towards it, steeply, at about forty-five degrees of bank, and try to stay in the strongest part of the rising air.
I did not manage that at first. My first four or five circles drifted out of the core and back in again, and I lost almost a hundred metres before I found it properly. After that came the most extraordinary twenty minutes I have spent anywhere. The variometer kept singing, the quarry turned slowly beneath my left wing, and the field got smaller and smaller until I could cover it with my thumb.
From the logger, which I copied out in the evening:
- release at 420 metres, launch number 112;
- lowest point 330 metres, while looking for the core;
- climb to 1,480 metres above the field, at an average of about one and a half metres per second;
- 52 minutes in the air altogether.
I could have stayed longer. The cloud base was a little above 1,700 metres, and the thermals worked all afternoon. But we had agreed that I would land within the hour, and I had been thinking about the circuit for a while already, the way you think about the last page of an exam. I flew back, lost the height in wide turns well away from the circuit, joined it at 250 metres as always and landed where I aimed.
My instructor was at the launch point when I came back. He asked how high I had got. I told him. He said, very good, now do it fifty more times.