About Gliding and Soaring
Which ever way you look at it, gliding is the best form of flying.
And cross country soaring is the best form of gliding.
Face it… slope soaring, occasionally called boring soaring is fine if you live in a country like the UK where they never see the sun and therefore cannot have thermals.
Wave flying… well it almost seems like cheating doesn't it? Hoid on with gritted teeth (because you are scared out of your wits) in the bumpy bits, and hold on with gritted teeth (because you are freezing cold) in the lift bits, and bingo! Diamond height gain!
No. Thermal soaring is where it's at. The true magic of riding invisible lines of energy in the sky… "When I got to 5000ft it was so unstable that almost no turns were needed. I could fly from cloud to cloud without turning in a convergence area that that stretched from the north end of the Kelvin range to Werris Creek, where there was a blue hole. I was able to fly for about an hour and a half without turning."
Why would you want to do any other form of flying?
Gliding is also the oldest form of flying.
You might say that the Italian mathematician Danti, from Perrugia, was gliding over Lago Trasimeno in 1490.
Certainly Sir George Caley's reluctant coachman was gliding when he flew across an English valley in 1853, and he resigned immediately afterwards because, as he said, "I have not been employed for flying."
Jean-Marie le Bris, after a life at sea, built an artificial albatross and got a local coachman to tow him up on a windy Brittany beach. He not only succeeded in gaining 100 metres in height, but in also giving the unfortunate coachman a taste of flying when he got caught up in the tow rope. Fortunately the horse, probably hearing the strangled voice of his master getting distant, slowed to a halt and both coachman and glider pilot descended safely to the beach.
Otto Lillienthal was the real pioneer of gliding, making over 2000 controlled flights during the 1890's in his weight-shift glider from man-made hills. Lillienthal has a great claim to be the father of flight. It's possible that if Lillienthal had continued, we'd all be happily flying advanced flex wing weight-shift gliders now.
Not only was Lilienthal a pioneer of flight, he was also a pioneer of sporting clothes. Have a look at any picture of the Wright Bros and you'll see them wearing three piece suits and stiff collars most of the time. The same applies to many sporting activities of the era. Lilienthal was one of the first people to have specially designed clothes for his activities. It is hard to make out on this picture, but apart from some natty shorts, Otto appears to be wearing some type of headgear too. None of these supposed eccentricities did any harm to the idea that you had to be barmy to think about flying.
The Wright Bros learned much from Lillienthal, if nothing else than that people who dreamed of flying were not mad! The Wrights borrowed Hargrave's box kite structure and built a glider, making many brilliant flights in the early years of the 20 century. Nearly a thousand flights were made in winds up to 30 knots. Their flights often exceeded one minute in duration and included periods of where they maintained height over the dunes. For anyone who has ground handled a lightweight glider in winds of this strength down at the beach, the fierce struggle against the wind, and the gritty sand between your teeth are not easily forgotten.
Then they made an extraordinary error. Instead of learning to soar the slopes of Kitty Hawk in Carolina, they took the retrograde step of fitting a noisy motor to their flying machine and abandoned gliders. Oddly, as early as 1901, Wilbur Wright had prophesied that pilots could "maintain themselves for hours at a time in this way … and rise into the higher air and search out the currents which enable the soaring birds to transport themselves to any desired point."
Orville Wright returned to the dunes at Cape Cod in 1911 and had a soaring flight which lasted over 11 minutes in a biplane glider almost identical to their aircraft of 10 years earlier. For most of this time he was soaring over the sand-hills in a way that the early "low and slow" hang gliders were to emulate in the late 1960s. This extraordinary record lasted 10 years and today is just a footnote to the history of gliding, whereas in fact it should probably have been a headline.
Gliding as a sport begain in 1910, when two schoolboys from Darmstadt in Germany, fascinated by the idea of strapping wings to their shoulders and flying, set out to find a suitable hill to launch off. In the Rohn mountains, they found the Wasserkuppe and in a rented cow shed built over 30 gliders with their friends. Like hang glider pilots of today, they loved the thrill of running down a hill and feeling the weight on their feet get less and less, until finally, they were airborne!
The Great War put a stop to their activities and it was not until 1920 that people returned to the Wasserkuppe to start gliding again. In a very short while, these pioneers achieved fantastic results, but not without cost. In the background to this picture, taking in 1923, there's the Denkmals… the monument to the fallen at Wasserkuppe.
Imagine. All these people must have walked up that hill!
The Wasserkuppe is where the spirit of gliding was born. They call it the Rohngeist. Here the pioneer pilots learned about slope soaring, then thermals, thunderclouds and increasingly large cross country distances. Anyone who reads the details of these early years cannot fail to be impressed or even amazed at their dedication, courage and self sacrifice… something which perhaps should be explored in more detail (along with the strange personalities of the Bros Wright.)
The slope beside the Denkmals is still a popular take off point for various types of gliders, hang gliders, paragliders, model gliders and full size sailplanes. But if you stand on this hill and view it with modern eyes, you'd be hard put to find what might be called a good bomb-out paddock. Especially considering the relatively fragile and complex aircraft they were flying compared with aircraft like hang gliders and paragliders which are of comparable performance and much easier to land, pack up and/or repair.
There's also a very good museum at the site.
With rumours of great flights at Wasserkuppe spreading all over the world, so did gliding and as aircraft designs, pilot skills and above all, knowledge improved, the time in the air and distances flown grew year by year.
At first, the milestones were, in retrospect, very small. Soaring or remaining above the launch height for a few minutes, then 40 minutes, then an hour and finally everyone was bored. Then the game (for it certainly was a game) became how far you could fly. At first these flights were done using a single thermal or maybe two, often under a developing thunder cloud. Then, following storm fronts and riding the huge waves of lift out in front, increasingly greater distances were flown. Into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France and so on.
But it was on a trip to America where Wolf Hirth first flew a true thermal flight helped by a newly installed variometer to gauge the rate of climb of his glider. At this time he relalised the fact that a sailplane had to be banked quite steeply to stay in a thermal. Hirth became very proficient at this both in theory and practice. In a wonderful and telling farewell to the USA, he was winch launched from a wharf on the Hudson river. He found thermals everywhere and flew for 30 minutes over New York city, at around 1000', finding no difficulty staying up. He was finally flagged down by the police for blocking the traffic on Broadway. They don't make them like that any more!
On his return to Germany, Hirth was very surprised to find that his techniques for thermalling were doubted by many experienced flyers. These people thought that it was better to do a skidding turn, keeping the glider as flat as possible, and minimise the sink rate. A gang of pilots, including Hirth, Kronfeld and Grönhoff showed how wrong these dissenters were by a series of remarkable record breaking flights.
From here on, the story of gliding became more international, and the focus in Germany moved away from the Wasserkuppe. In fact there had been a gliding event in England in 1922, almost as soon as the events at Wasserkuppe became well known. As might have been expected in England, the enthusiasm was there in bucketfuls, if not the concentration and technique.
The 1922 meeting was sponsored by the Daily Mail, mainly to prove that the Brits could do every bit as well as the Germans. Many of the gliders were assembled on the spot, some from war surplus wings and fuselages bought for a song. One glider was assembled in a tent, and proved to be too large to remove intact. Fortunately the tent blew down in an overnight storm which solved the immediate problem, but regrettably wrecked the machine in the process.
The English approach to learning how to fly was typical of a period where enthusiasm prevailed over knowledge. Not so long before this event, two young men were having an argument at a London club. One bet the other that flying was not so difficult for a chap with talent such as himself and he bet that he could get a pilot's license before breakfast time. The bet was accepted, and the party promptly left for the south coast. Being summer, it was daylight by 3.30 AM and flying started early. And sure enough the bet was won in time for a few kippers for breakfast. (You did not have to actually turn to get a pilot's license in those days!)
Typical of the energy of the pilots was the Handasyde Glider flown by FP Raynham who was at the time a well-known test pilot. He did not have time to connect the cable controlling the ailerons to the control stick, so he flew the glider with two hands, one on the joystick and the other pulling on the wire. And still managed a ridge soaring flight of over two hours. The longest flight of the meeting was by Alexis Maneyrol from France, who succeeded in breaking the German endurance record with a flight of 3 hours and 21 minutes.
Extraordinarily, gliding activity almost ceased after this meeting, and was not really revived until visits from to groups of Germans in 1929 to the UK kicked things off again. Robert Kronfeld astonished the English with a flight of over 50 miles on the south downs, landing near Portsmouth.