Come Fly With Me

Why was I learning to fly a glider? Well
gliders have many of the same characteristics
as HPAs.

HEN you look at an aircraft hangar

with those huge sliding doors at the

front, you would think that they must

need a massive motor to crank them open. Not

a bit of it. They slide aside so easily on their

wheels that, just by putting my back into it, I

was able to open the hangar doors where

another Guy – Guy Westgate – had parked his

gleaming, white two-seat glider. We were at

Lee-on-Solent Airfield, formerly the Royal

Naval Air Service Seaplane Training School. It

also served as an RAF base and a Fleet Air Arm

base known as HMS Daedalus – now where

have we heard that name before? Guy’s ‘day job’

is flying Boeing 747-400 airliners but he’s been

flying aerobatic gliders for over 20 years and

has won the National Glider Aerobatic

Championship eight times. He’s an advanced

aerobatic instructor and the best person I

could ever hope to have as a flying instructor

in a glider.

W

Learning to fly a glider would be excellent

practice for the HPA. Our HPA would have

to fly on the limited amount of power that I

would be able to supply, and gliders fly without

any on-board engine power at all. Gliders have

massive wings – the wingspan of the glider Guy

was to take me up in is 16.67 metres (almost

55 feet) – just like HPAs. Gliders are also built

of lightweight materials and have extremely

sensitive controls – completely different from

the superjumbos Guy is used to flying, but very

similar to HPAs.

88  HUMAN POWERED AIRCRAFT

Guy explained that even a short flight in a

glider would give me a good understanding

of some of the things that I would need to

master in the HPA – keeping the wings level,

for example, or avoiding ‘stalling’. An aircraft

will stall when its speed drops and the wing

can no longer do its job of providing the ‘lift’

that keeps the whole thing airborne. We’ll

be coming back to exactly how wings work a

little later, but I was about to get a practical

demonstration of what happens in a ‘stall’ and

it was immediately obvious why a ‘stall’ would

scupper any HPA flight.

In the meantime, Guy had to get us airborne

in the glider. We manhandled it out on to the

runway and were then hooked up to a cable

that would allow a small plane to tow us into

the air. Guy and I sat one behind the other in

the cockpit with me in the student’s seat in

front. We both had a set of instruments in front

of us showing air speed, altitude, compass

direction and suchlike, but one of the most

important for me was the attitude indicator

– yes, attitude, not altitude – also called the

‘artificial horizon’, that tells you whether you

are nose up, nose down or dipping one wing

lower than the other. My feet were on pedals

that controlled the rudder and I had a joystick

that operated the ailerons. Push forward and

it would make the glider dive, pull back to

climb, and move left or right to start banking

into a turn. I didn’t realise at the time quite

how much Guy’s introduction to these basic

aircraft controls would help me to understand

their workings when we started looking at the

science of flight.

Right: If I looked like I was
a bit nervous about taking
control of Guy Westgate’s
glider, it’s because I was!