Gliding

When you were a child, your mother would regularly find you on the roof, arms covered in feathers, with helium balloons from Burger King sellotaped to your head. Your relationship with the family budgie was a little too close for comfort and you plagued Mary Fitzgerald with requests for a programme devoted to making cardboard wings. In short, like so many before you, you wanted to learn to fly. If the desire is still with you, and you think that aeroplanes are cheating, then why not take up gliding?

Gliders are essentially planes without engines and they fly using only the power of air. One of the first documented gliders to carry a person was built by George Cayley, a British scientist, naturalist, engineer and inventor, in 1849. Cayley naturally wanted to test his design without killing himself, so he found an easily disposable ten-year-old servant boy to pilot the craft's first flight. The jaunt was successful, lifting the boy a few metres off the ground during a test run.

Cayley continued to work on his design, but as the servant boy had wisely decided to grow up and hotfoot it off the estate, a new pilot had to be found for the next test flight in 1854. This time, Cayley pointed his whip at his coachman. The coachman flew for 200 metres across Brompton Dale in Yorkshire, touched down and promptly handed in his notice, declaring, "I was hired to drive, not to fly."

Gliding really came into its own in Germany, after World War I. Strictly restricted by the Treaty of Versailles from developing single seater aeroplanes, the Germans stuck to the letter of the law and work on developing ever more efficient gliders. As gliders became heavier and more powerful, people began to become interested in taking to the skies as a sport, and gliding spread around the world. However, Germany remains the premier centre for gliding today, and all major glider manufacturers are based there.

Since gliders have no engine, they must be launched into the air before the gliding can begin. This can be done in three ways - by winch, by bungee catapult or by aeroplane tow. Once the glider is up in the air, then the pilot's task is to stay aloft. They do this by locating bodies of air whose upward movement exceeds the sink rate of the glider.

Thermals, rising columns of air resulting from the localised heating of the ground, are widely used by pilots. On days when there is enough moisture in the air, thermals can be identified by the white puffy cumulus clouds, but pilots also use the gliders instruments to locate them. Pilots also use ridge lift, which occurs when a strong wind blows perpendicular to a ridge. The wind flows up and over the ridge (e.g. a cliff) and produces a vertical lift that can sustain a glider. Wave lifts occur when the wind blows against a hill or mountain, comes back down on the other side and bounces off the ground and heads upwards again. This creates a very smooth upwards flow of air that may go down and up again for several cycles, so the pilot doesn't need to be near a mountain range to make use of it.

If you do decide to take gliding lessons, then you won't be catapulted into the ether and told to find a thermal. You will go up in a two-person craft, accompanied by an instructor trained to stay alive and calm your panic. As you keep taking lessons, you should eventually be permitted to go up on your own (solo). The average experience level before solo flight is between 70 and 100 launches. Once you can go solo, then you can choose to enter competitions or train as an instructor yourself.

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