Three launches and a day of pushing gliders
The first thing nobody tells you about gliding is how little of it is flying. I arrived at the airfield yesterday at nine and drove home at half past eight in the evening. In between I spent seventeen minutes in the air.
A gliding club runs on its members. Nobody is paid, not the instructors, not the winch driver, not the person running the launch point, so everybody who flies also works. In the morning we pulled the gliders out of the hangar, washed the dead insects off the leading edges and towed them with an old estate car to the launch point at the western end of the field. During the day I held wingtips level for take-offs and pushed landed gliders back to the start. In the afternoon someone sat me at the folding table with the launch log, where every flight is written down with its pilots and its times of take-off and landing. At seven we did it all again in reverse.
The flying came in between. The club trains on a two-seater with the student in front and the instructor behind, launched by winch: a big engine at the far end of the field winds in a cable about a kilometre long, and the glider climbs at the end of it like a kite on a string. You go from standing still to a hundred kilometres an hour in two or three seconds, then the nose comes up steeply and you climb for the best part of a minute until the cable falls away. My three launches, from the log:
- first: release at 380 metres, 5 minutes in the air, instructor flying, me watching;
- second: release at 410 metres, 6 minutes, me on the controls in straight flight, instructor doing the circuit and the landing;
- third: release at 400 metres, 6 minutes, me trying a turn and getting the rudder the wrong way round.
The rudder is the thing. In a glider you have to coordinate the stick and the rudder pedals in every turn, and if you don’t, a piece of red wool taped to the outside of the canopy, the yaw string, blows sideways and tells you so. Mine spent most of the third flight off to one side, and my instructor spent it saying Seitenruder, the German word for rudder, which I now know very well.
I paid the joining fee in the clubhouse in the evening, along with nine euros for each launch. My instructor wrote the three flights into a new logbook and signed them. On the first page it now says three launches and seventeen minutes.