You pilot types may well find this a bit ho-hum! It's actually just chopped from my blog, so don't worry if it sounds like you've come in half-way through a story
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On the highway, back out of Gympie, I passed the airport again where I'd stopped before dawn, and just at that moment, a glider came in low over the fields, and descended onto the runway. Intrigued, I turned around, drove back to the airport, and drove down a side road to the back of the runway, where several gliders lay arrayed, and their pilots milled around a caravan control tower/lunchroom. As I watched, a beat-up old car with cracked windscreen and no boot came roaring down the side of the runway, and unloaded a large cable. Further intrigued, I went in to say hello, stopping to grab the camera and fisheye lens on the way.
It turns out the gliders are launched via winch from the other end of the runway, on a cable one mile long. The winch is actually a V8 engine with an automatic transmission, and a spool to gather the cable. Soon enough, one of the gliders prepared for launch, its pilot squeezing into the tiny cockpit, the cable was attached, and the cable slack taken up. When the signal was given for launch, the acceleration was quite something - the aircraft hurtled along the ground briefly, then rocketed up at about a fifty degree angle. Diminishing in size rapidly, the thing eventually gained enough height and speed to drop the cable, which descended at a moderate speed, slowed by a small parachute.
The cable is dropped either manually by the pilot, or by slipping off the back of the attachment hook. There’s also a weak point near the cable end that will break before loading too much stress on the aircraft, should normal release not occur. These gliders weigh in the order of five hundred kilograms, and can stay up for hours at a time, if there are enough thermal currents with which to gain altitude. One of the guys told me he’d done a few trips of up to five hundred kilometres! I had a guided tour of the ins and outs of gliders, the instruments they carry, and their controls.
One thing that impressed me was the airspeed indicator that was sensitive enough to pick up someone blowing across the wing - all displayed in glorious analogue wonder, these aircraft all being between twenty-five and fifty years old. For those who were wondering (as I was), one particular thirty-year-old fibgreglass single-seater I inspected would set you back about thirty thousand dollars - I don't know how typical that might be.
Sunlight blazing down is exactly what glider pilots hope for, to generate the thermals they use to stay aloft. Today was good gliding weather. However, human beings don’t do so well in the sun, especially pasty folk such as yours truly. I could feel myself cooking as the sun beat down. In the cockpit of a glider on the ground was even worse, especially so in an aluminium-bodied aircraft like the one I found myself in. Lowering the canopy was like entering an oven.
However, once the winch power hits hard, and, bracing yourself, you hurtle into the clear blue sky with your stomach back on the runway, cool air starts to rush through the vents, and temperature falls back to more manageable levels.
If you look at the front of the cockpit, you can see a black-rimmed slot at the front of the canopy glass - that’s an air vent. Also at the front, just outside the canopy, is a small post with orange string tied to it. This is an instrument that tells you which way the aircraft is pointing. Given that there's obviously a lack of reference points sometimes, this lets one know if your moving in a different direction to that in which you're pointing. Rudder control is for addressing this. I was interested to discover that the rudder does not really adjust the direction in which you're moving - banking does that, much like riding a motorbike. Moving the rudder is like steering a car on ice - it'll make the vehicle face a different way, but not change the direction in which it's moving.
The fisheye of course comes to the fore in an environment like this, where the subject is all around. It’s one of the rare occasions in which the nature of the fisheye serves to retain the natural proportions of things, where a rectilinear wide angle would distort them. It also fits more stuff in.
While the ride was generally smooth, there were still a few sharp turns that really took the breath away, including a very sharp turn back to the runway as we came back in for landing without as much height as might be preferred. Then, before I knew it, we were down, stopped, and pushing the aircraft back down the runway.
So, yes, that was fun
I can see why people get hooked on this sort of thing.
I bid farewell, and pointed the car once again back towards Brisbane.