COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

COMBAT AND COMPETITION
position in order to see what the recovery was like, in terms of control
loads and response, but the Army glider pilot instructor would have
none of it. Even when I explained to him what I was trying to do.
The approach and landing was quite dramatic. Having watched
some of my fellow students I flew a confident circuit, positioning high
above the runway threshold, lowered the vast flaps and pushed the
nose down into a steep dive. There was an immediate and disapproving
reaction from the back seat:
"You'll undershoot from here! Raise the flaps and go round again."
Go round again - what the hell was he talking about? Yet, once the
flaps were up, it all seemed to work with surprisingly little loss of
height. The landing was a joke. A headlong diving approach followed
by a very determined roundout. Hard back with both hands, the speed
decaying rapidly, and a creaking far below as the undercarriage took
the strain.
This uncouth manoeuvre had to be initiated at just the right height.
Too soon and she would drop out of the sky. Too late and you would
hit the ground still going downhill at a rate of knots. Ballooning and
float didn't come into it all. And we were flying an empty glider. What
it must have been like, landing with a tank on board I hate to think.
We towed the Grunau Baby with the ETPS Tiger Moth and
re-discovered aileron drag. A reminder that rudders still had a use
apart from countering torque and coping with asymmetric power. As
the thermals began to stir, there were brief opportunities to try our
hands at soaring. Brief unfortunately they had to be. Because we were
evaluating the Grunau as another aircraft and not in its operational
role.
As if to encourage us further Kit Nicholson, a leading prewar
architect and glider pilot who had served in the Fleet Air Arm,
dropped in at Cranfield. He was flying a German Meise similar to the
one which I had 'liberated' at Cuxhaven the previous summer. The
Meise, or Olympia, was Hans Jacobs winning design for the Olympic
Games, and our visitor had flown it from Bramcote some 40 miles
away. We were most impressed.
Soon afterwards Robert Kronfeld came to ETPS. At that time a
Squadron Leader in the RAF, he gave a talk about the Airborne Forces
Experimental Establishment, where he had been working as a test
pilot. His lecture was illustrated with slides showing some quite
remarkable trials. But a few of us - Nick Goodhart and myself
amongst them - would have preferred a talk on soaring flight from the
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