Two and a half seasons in one logbook
The licence came in the post nineteen days after the practical test, in a plain envelope that I nearly threw away with the advertising. It is a small card that says I may fly gliders on my own and, once I have a little more experience, take passengers. It took two and a half seasons, two exams and a great many Saturdays.
The theory came first. In March I sat nine multiple-choice papers at the state aviation authority in Stuttgart, on a Tuesday morning: air law, meteorology, navigation, principles of flight, operational procedures, flight performance and planning, aircraft general knowledge, human performance and communications. You need three quarters of the answers right in each. I sat them in German, the language I had learnt it all in, and my worst result was in air law, whose questions are written in a German that even my German colleagues find heavy going.
The practical test was on Saturday the 12th of September, with an examiner from another club in the back seat. There were three flights: a winch launch with a cable break that he announced only by pulling the knob, a precision landing on a marked strip, and a longer flight with stalls, a spin and its recovery, and an approach to a stubble field that we broke off at a safe height. At the end he signed a form on the bonnet of the cable retrieve car and shook my hand. There was beer for everybody again, and I paid for it again.
The totals, now that the gliders are back in the hangar for the winter:
- 2024: 52 launches, 5 hours 10 minutes, all dual;
- 2025: 99 launches, 25 hours 50 minutes, first solo in June;
- 2026: 85 launches, 43 hours, including nine aerotows behind the club’s tug;
- longest flight: 3 hours 25 minutes in July, along the edge of the Jura on a north-westerly wind;
- altogether: 236 launches and 74 hours.
That long July flight was the one I enjoyed most. When the wind blows against the steep north-western edge of the Jura, the air is forced upwards, and a glider can fly along the slope for hours, a few hundred metres above the trees, without circling at all. Next year I want to fly my first real cross-country flight, a triangle of a hundred kilometres. My instructor says that will take another fifty launches of patience. He has been right about the numbers so far.