Solo on the eighty-seventh launch
It happened yesterday, on a Saturday that began like any other. In the morning I flew two launches with my instructor, a normal circuit and a cable break at 140 metres, which I handled well. After lunch he flew one more with me, said nothing at all during the whole flight, and after the landing he climbed out, fastened the straps of the empty back seat so that they could not catch on anything, and took his cushion with him.
Then he said the sentence every student waits for: one circuit, the same as always, and land where you always land. Someone held the wingtip, the cable was hooked on, and I was off.
The first surprise was the launch. Without the instructor’s eighty-odd kilograms the glider leapt off the ground and climbed more steeply and higher than I was used to. I released at 450 metres, the highest launch I had ever had. The second surprise was how quiet it was. There was nobody behind me breathing, nobody to ask, and the only voice was my own, saying the checks out loud on the downwind leg as I had been taught.
The flight itself was the most ordinary circuit I have ever flown. I landed a little long, on the grass to the right of the usual spot, and when I opened the canopy my instructor was walking towards me holding up two fingers, meaning two more. My first solo flights, from the log:
- launch 87: release at 450 metres, 7 minutes;
- launch 88: release at 430 metres, 6 minutes;
- launch 89: release at 440 metres, 8 minutes, with one gentle turn in rising air that I will not yet call a thermal.
Up to yesterday I had 9 hours and 40 minutes of dual flying. The twenty-one minutes alone now stand in the logbook in the column I had been looking at for more than a year.
There is a tradition in German clubs for the first solo, and it involves a bunch of nettles and the seat of your trousers. I will leave it at that. In the evening there was beer for everybody at the launch point, which is also a tradition, and the new solo pilot pays for it, which is the other half of the tradition.