The latest issue of the glossy aviation magazine Australian Pilot contains an article I’ve written about my gliding experiences. As you would imagine, it is a well-written, very readable tale! Rush out now to the newsagent and buy a copy.
If you don’t want to do that, you can read it by clicking on this (4.3 megabyte) pdf version – glidearticle – or I’ve reproduced it below in all its glory.
That Silver C flight was a wonderful experience and it was a pleasure to write about it and recall the moment. It’s not just boasting, honest.
I’ll have to go back to Lake Keepit some time to have a go at the next step, a 300 kilometre flight.
Here it is.
On cloud nine, By John Sharpe
Sitting quietly beside my glider on a dusty grass runway in the middle of nowhere, a powerful rush of emotion swept over me. I’d done it. I had just landed after a five-hour soaring flight, an achievement I’d first dreamed of half a century before.
I patted my sleek sailplane and said a silent thank you. I also thanked the clusters of cumulus clouds that helped me rise to almost 9000 feet, fly more than 100 kilometres and stay aloft for a crucial five hours. Crucial because the Silver badge qualification, the international mark of a qualified glider pilot, requires five hours duration, a height gain of 3000 feet and a cross-country distance run of at least 50 kilometres. You can do them all separately, but I had managed them all in one flight.
I was so happy I even said a friendly hello to the kangaroos gathering on the remote NSW airstrip as the daylight began to fade.
The duration task had been touch-and-go. The weather at Lake Keepit Soaring Club was perfect – sunny with fluffy white clouds. But this was autumn, and there was the problem. Gliders stay aloft by circling in columns of rising air – thermals – triggered by the sun heating the ground and the ground heating the air just above it. As this warm air rises a few thousand feet and cools, water vapour condenses into water droplets and gives birth to clouds.
The lower sun and shorter days of April mean the thermals don’t start to work until after 11am and finish about 4pm. I was towed up to 2000 feet at 11.45 and then climbed in thermals to 6000 feet to begin my 50-kilometre task. Cross-country gliding involves a close relationship with the clouds born from the thermals. When they gave me good lift, I thanked them. When the lift was weak and I was getting low, I wheedled, cajoled and pleaded for more. When they tricked me and gave only sinking air, I cursed them!
I was proud to be at the birth of my favourite cloud – it was just a little baby wisp of white vapour when I detected lift. As I circled underneath, it grew into a majestic mature white airy castle that pulled up so strongly I had to speed away to avoid being sucked into it. It had taken me up to 8700 feet – and my toes were getting cold! (It was 27 degrees on the ground, but 5 degrees up high).
I wasn’t alone in the sky – a huge wedge-tailed eagle shared a thermal and glared at me, and tiny swifts darted across my path, chasing insects carried aloft in the rising air.
I achieved my distance task – Manilla to Gunnedah – and returned to Keepit in less than three hours. Then I needed to loiter in the sky for another couple of hours.
But by 4.15 I was struggling to stay aloft in weak patches of lift, using all the concentration and willpower I could summon at the end of the long flight. The last 20 minutes was in still air, a gentle downhill cruise that gave me time to enjoy the magnificent scenery of inland NSW. I could see Tamworth to the east, below me gleamed the Namoi River and the shining Lake Keepit, to the west was Gunnedah and beyond that was a narrow column of smoke from a fire in the Pilliga Scrub near Coonabarabran.
Then I came down to earth – literally – and looked at my watch. It showed I’d managed several minutes more than the five hours – but I had to subtract a few minutes for the tow up to 2000 feet behind a power plane before I started my proper soaring flight.
Nigel, a friendly fellow pilot (all glider pilots are friendly, but he was especially so), helped me with the unfamiliar task of downloading the GPS flight logger into the clubhouse computer. Whew! The logger showed a soaring flight of five hours and 30 seconds! I bought us both a beer to celebrate victory by a hair’s breadth.
The slim, efficient 15-metre long wings of the glider, a Rolladen-Schneider LS7, helped me stay aloft, the machine losing height at just 125 feet a minute.
My first solo in a glider was 48 years ago at the age of 16, with the RAF air cadets at Spitalgate, England. The glider was an ancient canvas-and-wood craft called a Slingsby Tandem Tutor T-31 and the winch-launched flights lasted about three minutes. (The Tutor can glide 18 kilometres for a 1000 metre (3280 feet) height loss while the streamlined glassfibre LS7 can glide more than 44 kilometres).
That 16-year-old’s dream of a Silver badge has now been achieved. My next task? I need a flight of 300 kilometres for a Gold badge, and then 500 kilometres for a Diamond one.
But then there’s the other dream of my youth. I’m only 65 now, that’s not too old to begin a career as a rock star, is it?
