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Aviation History
1953
1953 - 1341.PDF
497 FLIGHT 9 October 1953 By KENNETH OWEN Elegance over Dun stable: An Olympia, seen from the soaring ridge. At the foot of the hill, the London Gliding Club's land ing site and clubhouse. ENGINES—ARE THEY NECESSARY? Some Reflections on Attempting to be a Bird SILENCE is a beautiful thing. Combine this beauty with the exhilaration of flight, and the result should be worth-- while indeed. Years ago, some such thought was vaguely responsible for my original desire to glide, a desire whose strength was matched only by my conspicuous failure to do anything at all about it—until August of this year. At that time the London Gliding Club expressed their willingness to try to teach me to glide; an optimistic gesture, and a sporting challenge which I accepted with alacrity and a small dry Martini. My previous gliding experience was zero. All my aviation had been achieved with the aid of one or more noise-producing devices, known as engines, which caused fans to rotate at the front end of the flying machine. I had therefore become conditioned to the continual droning of these inventions; and, indeed, silence from one of them would normally be the signal for a descent to be made on to the ground. Thus a certain amount of reorientation was first needed before I could really believe in the new philosophy of being pulled at the end of a long string into the air, there to be cast off with no motive power other than gravity. The prospect of innumerable dead-stick landings, extending on into eternity, was an equally novel concept. In the past I had, however, been aware of the existence of this method of progression. The sight of a skeleton-framed primary glider circling and descending rapidly, the exposed pilot seemingly suspended in space, had failed to inspire me. I had not taken up gliding at that time, and the sight of the primary caused merely a wish for things to stay that way. The recollection of polished work in Olympias by Goodhart, Stephenson and Lee at various air displays in this country, and of formation gliding at Soesterberg —which I still believe to have been impossible—reminded me, nevertheless, that sailplane flight could be an inspiring thing. This opinion was confirmed by my friend and one-time lecturer, THE author, a member of our editorial staff, is an ex-Fleet Air Arm power pilot who has flown the "Flight" Gemini on many of its visits to clubs and air displays this season. Having spent part of his summer leave learning to glide, he gives in these pages some impressions of his conversion to engineless flight. Alan Yates (himself an experienced Olympia pilot), and my mind was made up. I would follow in the footsteps—or the thermals —of Philip Wills, and try very hard to be a bird. Attaching myself to the second half of one of the London club's two-week training courses, I met my instructor, bad weather and a new philosophy on my first day at Dunstable. The philosophy is one of calm patience together with a willingness to push or pull gliders long distances from the point (A) where they land to the point (B) they are launched. (It subsequently transpired that most glider pilots can in fact make (A) tend towards (B) on the majority of occasions, but pupils in the two-seater are inclined to make interesting, rather than accurate, approaches and landings.) My instructor was to be John Simpson, a schoolteacher by profession and an experienced sailplane pilot who habitually spends many weeks of his summer vacation teaching people to be birds. Half the course-members were his responsibility, the remainder being in the care of one George Scarborough, the club's full-time flying instructor, whose flying skill was equalled only by his unique ability to ensure in picturesque language that pupils were not left entirely unaware of their own shortcomings. "Power pilot did that," commented George soon after my arrival, pointing to the splintered wreckage of a Tutor in the club hangar. No reply was expected; nor was one given. First impressions from the ground of the gliders in the air were of the steep launching angle (as if lying on one's back in a lift going up?) and the shallow angle of bank, compared with powered aircraft, as they turned—this latter, on reflection, being presumably due to their slower air speed. Watching from the launching point, one was fascinated from the start by the rear end-en view of the The Kirby Tutor, slight ly obscured by the author bewildered yet triumphant after his first engineless solo.
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