Turning and turning in the widening gyre (original) (raw)

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The most surprising thing about flying in a glider is how goddamn physical it is.

I've been thinking seriously about flying for a long time now, but circumstances conspired against it: workload, or travelling too much, or being in the middle of other projects, or being flattened by Long Covid. Or, most saliently, having a history of depression. Even the lowest tiers of pilot's licence require certified physical and mental health, and the merest mention of psychiatry sends the aeromedical system into immediate radical arse-covering mode. Now I've been okay for years, I'm working through the process: I give my chances about 50%, but that's enough to work with.

In between, over the past few years I've occasionally gone up in light powered aircraft. I love the sense of liberation that comes as the plane lifts off, I love the deep technical knowledge and the mental demands of flight, I love the rich challenge of understanding the aeroplane as a dynamic system in a complex aerial environment. I love the mixture of analysis and intuition that it takes to fly a plane, the combination of thinking things through and feeling them in the gut.

But more and more, I've been hesitating on environmental grounds. Even a small aircraft is a heavily CO₂-intensive way of getting around, maybe two to four times more so than a car; and that's quite a retrograde step for someone who's intentionally tending ever more to bicycles and trains. Bloody expensive, too. But then a few weeks ago I thought: what about gliders?

Germany, it turns out, is riddled with glider clubs, and the nearest one is only about ten kilometres from home, an hour by bicycle (hey, it's steep and I'm weak). So after a few emails to and fro, on Saturday I bicycled over to the airstrip for an introductory day. I had no idea what to expect: certainly not a relaxed gaggle of twenty-to-thirty-ish guys. But they were lovely: they roped me straight into being useful, and it was immediately clear that they're a club in the best sense, everybody chipping in and sharing the work. So for a couple of hours I sat around and watched and occasionally helped, until eventually it was time for me to learn how to do the aircraft inspection and then get into a glider myself.

A glider cockpit is tiny, like being harnessed into a shoebox. Rather disconcertingly, you're given a parachute and the world's most laconic course on bailing out of an aeroplane. You have a few dials in front of you: altitude, airspeed, and the "variometer" which indicates vertical speed. Then you close the canopy, complete your preflight checks, and — goddamn!

Nobody told you what taking off in a glider would be like. Actually they did, they said it's "like a Porsche on a rollercoaster", but that still doesn't quite convey it. The glider is at one end of the airfield; there's a truck-mounted winch half a mile away at the other end, and a rope connects the two. The winch is serious business, able to accelerate a half-ton of glider to over 100 km/h within a few seconds. The glider starts forward slowly, then the winch goes into "yoink" mode, within a few seconds the glider lifts off, and then the angle of the rope immediately pulls it into a 45° upward angle and the winch sends it rocketing up hundreds of metres like a paper dart flung by an overenthusiastic child. The first time, it takes your breath away in a whoop of exhilaration; after that it's just the best fairground ride. The rope unclips automatically at the apex of the launch, and suddenly you're free.

At which point you'd think gliding would be a serene business, wafting like a fairy across the landscape, but instead the first thing that happens is that the instructor yoinks the glider onto its ear and hauls it round in a two-gee turn, your inner ear goes into a flat spin and you spend the next few minutes mainly occupied with your own dizziness and nausea. But you get through that pretty quickly, and it turns out the instructor is just gaining some height to play with, and then they hand the controls over to you and you start to get it.

Flying a glider is a revelation in the nature of air. Powered flight teaches you a lot about air, but frankly your main goal is to punch through it. In a glider, you're using it, moulding your flight around it, dancing in it. The glider's relationship with air is immediate, visceral, a purer and more intimate mode of flight.

The variometer indicates how fast you're going up or down, since humans don't have a finely tuned sense for that. To avoid needing to watch the vario constantly, you can switch on a sound indicator. Going up is signalled by a little vweep-vweep noise that rises in pitch and excitement, vweep vweep-vwip-vwipvwipvwip! as the ascent gets faster. If you stray into falling air then that provokes a depressive, mopey "vwoop, vwoop, vwurrrrp". Very soon the vweep-vwip sound triggers a dopamine rush and within five minutes you're firmly addicted to it.

And to my surprise, I was able to get it. Maybe it was a particularly good day, but it was almost easy. You look for the warm places on the ground, you look for the clouds, you feel out and find the places where air is going up — the little upward shove beneath you, vweep-vweep-vweep! and you bank into a tight circle, and up up up you go! The valleys and fields dropping away and fading hazily beneath you, your perspective rising towards the plane of the clouds' bases. The instructor said I was good at it, but instructors always say that. But it felt great.

But man is it exhausting. At least for a beginner, there's no pause, there's no long stretches of level flight where you can just trundle and admire the view. Vario, horizon, bank angle, slip angle, roll, pitch, yaw. You're constantly tilting, spinning; you spend as much time on your side as upright. Gyrating, slipping, turning, dancing — but if you let your situational awareness slip then the sensation becomes the world gyrating around you and suddenly you're in a whirl of vertigo and nausea that you have to fight your way out of. And all of this while you're planning your next moves, feeling for that magic kick of rising air, examining the clouds and landscape for likely places to generate a thermal, keeping track of the airstrip, watching for other aircraft. My first flight was about fifty minutes, with me flying for most of it, and by the end of it I was so wrung out that I needed a moment before I could climb out of the cockpit after landing. The instructor handled the landing and a damn good thing too: I'm half sure I'd have pretzeled the aircraft.

But man, it was good.

So. Now I know what's involved, and I continue the laborious and uncertain task of seeing if I can get the medical certification. If I can? I'll be back. A gliding club is a slow way to get a glider pilot's licence—could be a year or more—but it strikes me as the more organic and thorough way than bespoke training (cheaper too!). I'm not in a hurry. Gliding is one of those things, like motorcycling, that becomes bloody dangerous if you try to push it too fast, and I'm old enough to take my time. Especially as I have the feeling I've found the right way to fly.

Onwards and upwards.