Alex C. Hicks Jr.
James Wasness runs alongside a glider for a moment to help stabilize the wings during takeoff.
By Phil Randall
When the powerful winch 4,000 feet in front of you starts reeling in the line the plane is tethered to, the lightweight craft lunges forward so quickly that your stomach says, “Hello, backbone!” And the plane’s slick aerodynamics respond instantly. In less than eight seconds, you are off the ground; you feel the lift at the same time the rumble of the wheel on the grass runway suddenly stops. The cockpit is filled with the sound of air rushing through a canopy vent.
The plane climbs at such a steep angle that the airport and distant tree line are gone in a blink; blue sky and white clouds are suddenly everywhere. Planet Earth is behind you as much as it is below you.
The sailplane zips toward the clouds at about 40 feet per second. The pilot in the back seat controls the climb, and the tether automatically releases at 1,450 feet. It pops free with a bang, and you are soaring.
It’s a thrilling way to fly — a fact that the Carolina Soaring Association has been trying to get across to Upstate residents for years. It’s what keeps club members coming back to the Spartanburg Downtown Memorial Airport almost every weekend from March through November.
“I have been doing this for 35 years,” calls out Joe Morelli, the pilot of this flight, over the wind noise in the cockpit. “I love the fact that it is pure piloting. It’s you and nature; you are harnessing nature’s energy and you are controlling this aircraft more than just relying on an engine. Your power is that thermal.”
Morelli is adept at finding thermals — air that is rising as the sun heats it. The white fluffy cumulus clouds this sunny day mark the location of the thermals that will fuel our flight. Clear blue sky, in contrast, is a “blue hole,” Morelli says, an area bereft of lift.
“We’ve got at least 15 single-seat ships in the club. So on a busy day, a nice, soaring day, you’ll see 10 or 11 of them out on the flight line, ready to go. As soon as the time is right, usually 11 or 11:30, the first guy will launch,” Morelli says. “He goes up and tests the air, and if he calls back, ‘It’s good! Ready to go! Launch the fleet!’ everybody will start launching. And these guys, the good ones, will travel up to 300 miles.”
But even if he ran out of lift, a glider pilot at 9,500 feet over Mount Mitchell, N.C., about 30 miles northeast of Asheville, could glide all the way back to Spartanburg’s downtown airport and have altitude to spare. “To help him do that, there are a lot of electronics in the plane,” Morelli says. “GPS, glide computers, navigation computers.”
Also, modern gliders are so well designed that they can obtain 45-to-1 glide ratios (travelling 45 feet forward for every foot of altitude lost), he says.
During our demonstration flight, we reach 4,500 feet, and we are bumping the clouds. The domed canopy allows an amazing view in every direction. The shadows of clouds move across the land below. The Upstate is very green and lush, and the city of Spartanburg appears to be nestled in a very green forest near the mountains.
The weight of two passengers plus the plane itself totals around 1,200 pounds. The thermals are not strong this day, yet we are climbing 1 meter per second. Morelli’s years of experience searching out the thermals under clouds could keep us flying for hours, but this is just a demonstration flight. In a few minutes he turns us back to the airport, brings us down smoothly, and lands the glider on the grass strip beside a runway with barely a bump.
A way for everyone to fly
Morelli, who is president of the Carolina Soaring Association, and his wife moved to Greer after he retired from the Navy. He has been flying since he was 15, got his license when he was 16 “and never looked back.”
He particularly loves gliders, however, because soaring is all about fun in the sky. “This is pure sport,” he says. “You learn to do this because of the skill involved, and in doing it, you are developing that skill.”
It also is a very economical way for people who have longed to fly to get airborne. The training costs are lower, the club‘s sailplane is available to members, and there is a supportive esprit de corps among sailplane pilots that comes free with the territory.
Morelli says, however, that many people who would love soaring see it too much as a “rich man’s sport” and don’t try it. While a state-of-the-art sailplane can run $140,000, excellent used gliders can be had for $35,000 and older but very functional gliders can be purchased for $10,000 to $15,000. Club members often partner to buy a glider as well.
“The reason they call it a rich-guy’s sport is because the rich guy is the only one who can afford the state-of-the-art equipment,” Morelli says.
And because it’s so much fun, it’s easy for a well-to-do retiree to get gung-ho on the sport, complete with $150,000 motor home pulling a $130,000 glider to exotic flying venues all over the country. But it doesn’t have to be that way — and such a rig wouldn’t get to all the great places to soar, anyway.
“This sport is done worldwide. You name a country, and there’s somebody who does it there,” Morelli says. “Japan. Australia. New Zealand. They have some of the best soaring sites. New Zealand because of their mountains. Australia because of their desert area.”
One of those great spots is Upstate South Carolina. With the Blue Ridge Mountains nearby, and the rolling countryside of Spartanburg County, there is a lot of beauty to behold from South Carolina’s skies. In fact, the president of the Soaring Society of America, Al Tyler, lives in Perry, S.C. Each spring a regional soaring competition is hosted in Perry, attracting scores of competitive glider pilots.
“We’ve got club members who started two, three years ago,” says Morelli, the club’s president and one of its flight instructors. “My last student got his license last fall. He’s 72 years old. And he is so good! So it is really not age-limited. It is more your ability and dedication to training. But we’ve got old students, young students — 16 years old girls, the whole gamut.”
In fact, the club has a youth program, and two of its youth members have gone on to the U.S. Air Force Academy, which begins pilot training using gliders. So those young members had a head start. “They are very good pilots,” Morelli says.
‘We used to dream of flying when we were little’
Larry Travers, the club’s chief instructor, is much like Morelli in that the flying bug bit early in life. In fact, that’s the way it is with most glider pilots.
“Just can’t stay away from it,” Travers says. “We started that way. … We used to dream of flying when we were little. I think we dream the most when we are little, don’t you think? And I used to dream of flying.”
However, Travers did not take his first glider flight until he was in his 40s, visiting a glider port in Chester in 1987.
“I talked to my instructor, and I said, ‘I’m going to come down here every Saturday and Sunday, and I want you to schedule me double lessons, in the morning and in the afternoon. Every weekend. I want to get this done.”
Decades later, Travers loves to train people with the same “just-can’t-stay-away-from-it” enthusiasm. He says 50 flights is a normal training time, but “I have a whole file of people, and none of them are the same. I’ve had some go 65, some go 30. It just depends on how good your eye-hand coordination is, and how much you want to study.”
What about the cost? Morelli offered some numbers.
“I would say the average training period for a student who had never done it before would run plus or minus $3,000. To get a power rating, you are looking at $15,000. When I did mine — I did my power rating when I was 16 years old — it cost me $650-$700. …. I was paying $10 an hour for the airplane. Now you gotta pay $90 an hour for the same airplane.”
With aviation fuel at $6 a gallon, soaring is both an economical alternative and environmentally friendly sport. The winch that pulled the sailplane airborne might use a quart of fuel, Morelli said. A season of soaring would probably require less fuel than a small private jet uses during takeoff.
“We can go for hours up there,” Morelli says. “Where we were before, we could have hung out under those clouds all afternoon.”
But sometimes, the lift runs out before you’re home. That’s when another benefit of the soaring club becomes evident …
‘Everybody lands out’
When glider pilots run out of lift far from home, they “land out” on the nearest runway if possible. Travers says he has landed out 15 or 20 times.
“Everybody who flies serious cross-country lands out,” he says. Pilots try to use one of the many airports in the Upstate, and “we have such nice navigational programs now that you can say, ‘Hey’ where’s the nearest airport?’ and it says, ‘Over there, four miles.’”
The pilot can radio the other club members, or one of the club’s volunteer tow-plane pilots, to bring his car and glider trailer to him and help him load it up.
“If you landed out today, you’d call us and say, ‘I’m not going to make it, I’m going in here or there,’” Morelli says. “And we’ll go ahead and finish our day, put our planes away, and come and get you. But the driver gets free dinner. It’s a custom. You gotta buy the guy dinner.”
The club has between 40 and 50 members, and it has about 15 gliders that members own. “There are times when we have so many people out here that they are standing in line to glide,“ Morelli says: “Single-seats launching, people standing around talking.”
In addition to the winch, club members have access to a tow plane that can get them airborne with the help of a volunteer tow pilot.
“Nobody gets paid. We are trying to build a club,” Morelli says. “We are trying to get you interested to come out and fly.”
And that is just fine with Stuart Jackson, a member, volunteer tow pilot, and winch operator. He has been flying for five years.
“When you have a passion so serious, one of the most rewarding things is to be able to share that passion with other people,” he says.
Morelli agrees. “I have been doing this for 35 years,” he says. “You just wouldn’t believe the enjoyment.”
Story and photo: http://www.goupstate.com
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