Soaring

Soaring isn't hang gliding. You fly in a sleek, white fiberglass aircraft with a canopy that closes over you. The fuselage is short, about half the length of the 55 foot wingspan, and the cockpit is so compact you have to flip up the instrument panel to slip your legs into the nose. Once you're in, the panel swings down and you lock yourself into a four-strap harness by inserting the the clips into a buckle on your chest. Since there's no engine there are only four instruments: an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, a compass and an odd one I'd never seen before. More on that later.

The sailplane's two wheels are on the centerline of the fuselage, one behind the other. They're recessed into the plane, so you're only sitting about a foot off the ground. It's tied to a tow plane with a thin rope laid out in a zig-zag pattern to avoid tangling, and as the Cessna lumbers down the runway the rope tightens and we become airborne almost immediately.

At 5,000 feet the pilot, Claude -who learned to soar in France - warns me he's detaching the tow. There's a dull "thud" and the glider enters a hard, tight bank to the right. This surprised me, but it was really cool. It turns out that standard procedure after release is for the sailplane to fly up and to the right while the tow plane dives down to the left. My wife, watching from the ground, thought the tow plane pilot was nuts.

The ride was smooth and the only sound was air rushing past the plane. I wondered if birds hear the same sound when they glide. We're acting a lot like seagulls, who increase their altitude by riding updrafts. In fact, it's the essence of what we're doing.

That oddball instrument is a variometer and it tells you whether you're in an updraft or a downdraft. It has (+) and (-) digital readouts and emits a beeping sound. If you "get lucky," which is a discomfiting term sailplane pilots use, you locate an updraft and circle in it to gain altitude. In an updraft the variometer shows (+) with a fluctuating numeral indicating its intensity and, simultaneously, the beeps are emitted closer together. In a downdraft, a (-) with intermittent beeps would tell you to keep looking.

Heated rising air can be produced by large parking lots, roofs and even highways. We used a large quarry. But finding the "thermal" is tricky because even a slight breeze moves it. Another source of updrafts is the is the wind, which blows in, hits the mountains and is directed skyward. Pilots "ride the ridge" by flying in a figure eight pattern that keeps them in the rising breeze.

There were two parallel runways, and we missed them both. On purpose, since sailplanes land on grass. As we skimmed over the turf at 55 mph our closeness to the ground made it feel a lot faster. In powered flight pilots slow down just before landing by raising the nose and "flaring out" as the plane nears the pavement, but Claude drove the glider straight in without flaring at all. He finally stopped by whipping to the right to avoid the planes parked ahead of us.

It was a good landing.

This kind of thing gets you thinking - about the amazing abilities of birds, the way they use winds and thermals, and the way man uses God's natural laws to mimic them. The order and design you see in this one tiny slice of life is just another way the Creator reveals himself to those who look.

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