I confess to many addictions, coffee being one of them (but I digress). Coffee to me is like wine, you can get it rough, or smooth, and it can cost from a few bucks for a cup, or a few more bucks for a jar of the stuff. I partake of the stuff many times during the day, mainly to wake me up, keep me awake, keep me attentive, and waste time, sometimes all at the same time.
Thankfully, my gliding addiction does not conform to the coffee analogy above. My kind of gliders can cost from a few hundred bucks, to quite a few thousand bucks. When I fly them, I’m alert, very much alive, sometimes trembling with fear (especially during launch), have a sore neck, am thirsty, hungry, sunburnt, happy, and longing for yet another coffee…
My gliding addiction is quite weird. I’m not talking about flying full-sized gliders, but flying the radio-controlled kind. One doesn’t see a lot of women flying R/C gliders these days, probably because it is very male-oriented, an “old mans” hobby. I think I like the hobby because of the technical aspects – I can dabble with some electronics, play around with wood, tinker with fibreglass, and occasionally have the excuse to touch the big machines in the old man’s workshop, the bench saw, the drill press, and the sander. My excitement is pretty much directly related to the wing span of the glider – the bigger, the better.
I also like the hobby because it’s peaceful. As some of you readers may recall, I used to sail International One Metre R/C sailing boats. The primary reason I left that hobby/sport was because it was stressful, argumentative, and extremely competitive. Flying my gliders can sometimes be quite stressful, especially during an “emergency”, but there’s no arguments, the competition is there (but in a different way), and the guys are great fun to chat to – ten minutes of almost pure terror and excitement, followed by an hour of relaxing, chatting, oogling, repairing, before the next flight…
In a competition, the only competitor is time, and the air is the medium that makes us laugh outrageously, or cry bitterly. The best times I have flying is when I achieve a stonking launch, fly a massive thermal and get the plane way up there, and when I can bring it down to a perfect spot landing. My first competition flight with an Icon 3.4m F3B glider was memorable – launching into a stiff breeze, I performed an amazing launch (half way up the “ping”, I realised she was heading for the moon, and yelled out “yee haa!”), and eventually won the round.
What makes the flights so stressful then? Well, imagine you’re flying a $5,000 glider, you need to fly a 2 minute flight to the second, and with a second to go, it’s about 4 feet off the ground. Down elevator = broken nose. My brand new Icon TD suffered a broken nose as a result, but it was an easy fix. The stress was quite high for a while, seeing the nose bent out of alignment. It flew an almost perfect five rounds too.
Imagine watching your $600 brand new glider leave the launcher’s hand, drop a wing tip, and immediately spear into the ground, and shatter into seemingly hundreds of pieces. Stress. We still don’t know what happened to that glider, but the nature of this hobby demanded that glider be rebuilt, and she flys once more, but only on the slope, as the impact fractured the wing spar.
I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with building gliders. I’m fairly impatient these days, and just wanna fly them, so I tend to take a long time to build one from a kit. The more expensive gliders are typically carbon fibre and kevlar, so I’m not really building them, but assembling them. My hate relationship stems from the procrastination at each step, adding to the time taken to build them, and the fact I’m now rather sensitive to some of the glues used, especially Cyano Acrylate (CA). If I get a wiff of just one single drop of CA, chances are I’ll end up in hospital with mucus in my lungs.
I now wear a fume mask whenever I build using CA.
All the time and effort spent building and kitting out the gliders is rewarding in the end. I’ve built some truly beautiful gliders, probably none better than my little QuickFlick II hand-launched glider.
This glider was built up from laser-cut balsa parts, some carbon fibre, and lots of time. I created along the way a rather detailed photo-journal of the build, which can be found in the “My QuickFlick II” thread on RC Groups. It flys quite nicely, though I’m still finding the right CG balance point, and learning how to fly this little HLG.
The first glider in my fleet was the Spirit Elite 2m, six channel glider. It took me about 3 months to slowly build, following the instructions pretty much to the letter, learning new skills along the way. I enjoyed that build, apart from the moment when I took one of the inner wing panels off the plan, and discovered it had a nice bow in it, and thus discovered (too late) that the entire table had a bow in it.
Probably the biggest rush I’ve ever experienced was when the Spirit Elite flew for the first time. I went down to the Heathcote Soaring League, and asked the pilots there to maiden it for me. Seeing the glider leave Matt Lowe’s hand , and fly straight and true down the field was just wonderful. Those months of being sick (balsa dust and CA fumes), sweating through the heat, swearing and cursing (and wondering what the hell I was doing building a glider), were all forgotten. Matt put it up on the winch, and she flew quite well, thermalled away for a bit, and the landing was quite gentle too. I was hooked!
Today, she sits forlornly on top of the cupboard gathering dust, without the electrics, as I’d scavenged them for use in other gliders. She’s otherwise undamaged, ready to fly, if only I’d put another heart in her.
Nowadays, I fly on the slope, as well as on the field. Gliders are constantly “falling” through the air – in the absence of rising air, the glider will eventually touch land. Out on the field, we need thermals (rising masses of hot air basically) to keep the gliders up. On my big planes, I can average about 5 to 6 minute flights in dead-still air with no thermal activity. In active air, the only limit is my endurance level, concentration, and eyesight. Sloping is different to thermal flying. The air is being pushed uphill by the wind, and if we throw our gliders into that air, they will rise in much the same way whilst thermal flying, but typically with much faster climb rates. Sloping removes the urgency associated with hunting and working thermals – indeed, on some days when the wind is roaring up the hill, you could throw a brick with wings off, and it’d fly.
My favourite glider for sloping has to be my little Alula hand-launched glider. It’s tiny, extremely nimble, fast, light, and great value for money (only $US50 plus servos, battery, and receiver). This glider is made out of EPP foam, so it’ll take some pretty brutal punishment before breaking. The best thing about EPP gliders is they “crash”, you pick them up, throw them off the hill again, and away they go. The CG is pretty sensitive, but once that magic CG spot is found, the Alula just excels – so easy to fly, but so responsive too.
My fleet of planes is now about 13 planes strong, and still growing (but at a slower pace, thankfully). I’m just so tempted to buy more gliders, as I love flying them so much. Ok, ok, I’m also a sucker for the looks – “if it looks good, it must be able to fly good”, is my usual motto. I’m still lusting after an FVK Ava, and the new Pike Perfect. So many planes, so many choices, so much money, not enough space to store them!