KRONFELD ON GLIDING AND SOARING.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

192 KRONFELD ON GLIDING & SOARING
ailerons must be employed to give the wings an angle that
will enable them to lie parallel to the slope.
The veto upon downhill landings which is so frequently
stressed in the period of early training gains importance as
the gliding angles improve. With high efficiency planes it
is impossible to land when flying downhill, but their use
frequently involves uphill landings with the wind behind
the machine if the pilot is to land at a high starting place
after a flight that has been cut short by loss of wind.
In such cases you sometimes dash towards the slope at
sixty miles an hour, and the steeper it is the more sharply
you must push before reaching it. It looks as if you are
trying to ram it, and you must therefore keep all your
self-preservation instincts under the severest control until
the last moment. Only when the onlooker imagines he
can already hear the crash may you pull sharply on your
elevator, so that your line of flight assumes the same angle
as that of the slope. By means of the gentlest pushing and
pulling you accommodate yourself to the gradient of the slope
and land well under the most difficult circumstances.
Although such landings are generally brought off well,
the pilot needs very practical powers of self control. Often
two landing possibilities present themselves, one of which
is safe, on level ground, straight into the wind, but at a
spot where no one will see it, while the other is uphill,
daring and right in the midst of a cheering crowd. The
conscientious pilot will always choose the safe landing,
unless some very important factor drives him to decide
against it.
All this is part of flying knowledge and skill. The pilot
who acquires the feeling that he can handle his machine
well and make his turns in the correct places and is also
confident that he can land safely, will certainly soon feel a
desire to put his knowledge and skill to some practical
test. In soaring the simplest way to do this is to make an
endurance flight.
For such a flight a good machine, capable of holding its
own in a region of upward currents, is important ; the other
two factors are a steady wind and a steady pilot! The better
and steadier the conditions are, the easier is the task for