Total States: 9
Today the whole family headed out to the Texas Soaring Association, where one of my cousins is pretty involved flying gliders. These are the type of gliders that are towed up a few thousand feet by a tow plane, then catch the thermals to stay up longer. I got to go up on a half-hour demo flight with one of the instructors. Man, he was a character. Turns out he flew fighters in Vietnam (some pretty crazy missions!) and is actually currently a test pilot for Lockheed Martin. So, needless to say I had a fair amount of confidence in his ability to pilot a simple glider!
The Glider we went up in...We got hooked up with a tow, then sailed around a little looking for thermals in the near vicinity of the glider port. We caught a few, then he let me take the controls for a while. I've flown a little Cessna plane briefly before, so I had used the whole joystick/yaw pedal arrangement before, but not near enough to "feel" things. It was the same here. The controls all gave the inputs I expected, but I definitely did not feel connected with the glider. A few more runs and I'm sure it would come though. Then I relinquished the controls, and got a nice roller coaster ride with some pretty high G's and some spots getting pretty close to zero G's. It was a fun experience... flying with a great view through the bubble canopy without any engine noise or anything.
Getting a tow on up to 3500 feet
The glider port from the airI got some good video clips of taking off and landing, so one of these days I'll take the time to upload some of the videos to Youtube so I can embed them here in the blog.
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